Rootsmagic Mapping

Rootsmagic has a great feature which allows you to see clearly on a map where those important family and individual events took place. As the enhancements continue version 4.0.8 now shows Place Details in Rootsmagic Mapping for any individual selected, providing of course the user has entered the co-ordinates of those Place Details.

I got to thinking that it would be much more informative to see all Place Details within any selected Place. This would of course involve a further drop down option for Place Details and the pop up would also need to show the individual details in addition to what is currently displayed. This would prove extremely useful as a visual representation of events in a geographical grouping. The user could zoom in to street level if desired if the display was over populated or whatever level they prefer, the items bordered in red are additional to what Rootsmagic Mapping currently displays.

Getting individual mapping information at present is not such an obvious task for the user, many users do not even know about the drop down options available under Mapping.

Currently with Places (default) selected in the drop down you will get one single plot for each Place when highlighted. Selecting People from the drop down will display Place or Place Details (if already geocoded) for the events in that persons life. Navigating through Tools > Mapping > Selecting People from the drop down list and then finding the person in the current uninformative list (see below) is no easy task. One very easy way to show all the events in a persons life would be to add Mapping to "right click" selections on the particular individual, perhaps under the existing Reports option, then you would arrive directly on the display screen.

Now to get back to the problem of finding People in the currently uninformative list presented by Rootsmagic, the solution is simple - more information. Even the simple addition of record number and birth date would be a great help here. I am sure some users will argue for the options to also add death date and providing your screen size allows it and RM remembers your screen and pane preferences then why not.

Well wishes are one thing but I have to admit I am unsure of the limits or possibilities of what information Rootsmagic can send to Bing Maps to make this all come about. One thing I would feel pretty confident about is that Bruce & team will extract the best from what is possible during the future development of Rootsmagic.

I'm not a fan of employing "work arounds" to overcome limitations or missing features in software packages, unless of course there is some short term gain. Employing a work around long term to achieve a desired result is negative so really it is a required enhancement and should be treated as such. The problem with adopting a work around that when the software develops beyond the limitation all your hard work is redundant and you need to adopt the new way of doing things.

Recently I did have a need where I believed Rootsmagic Mapping could help me in the short term so decided to invest a bit of time for the greater good. I was working the records within a Parish unfamiliar to me and struggling a bit with the Places due to poor hand writing and record quality. I seemed to be constantly looking up a table for the correct Townland and Parish information then referring to a Map to see the Townlands geographic location. I decided to create a Dummy Person in Rootsmagic, use the Parish as the Place and within that enter each Townland as Place Details, it worked very well as you can see below.

Now when I look at the Place Details for Tartaraghan, Armagh, Ireland I have a reliable list of Townlands within that Parish and I can see their geographic location on the Map. A reliable list of course as I instantly noticed the two locations circled which were obviously not part of that Parish and had crept in through a Merge operation.

So now through using one application rather than three I have a full reference for this Parish, the townlands within it and the geographic locations. I also attached a scan of a map to the Place, and added notes from the Ordnance Survey Memoirs of Ireland to each townland. Now on a research trip I have a full reference to that Parish and all located within Rootsmagic.

Download the basic GEDCOM file for the Parish by right clicking here and using the "save as" option, then you can experiment in Rootsmagic Mapping for yourself.

Another Rootsmagic user develops external queries through the use of SQLite and has developed various useful reports which we can only hope get the attention of the Rootsmagic developers. The one to the left uses Google Maps to plot events for multiple persons for a geographic area.

Visit Toms Wiki and read more on the possibilities and the queries that he has delevoped to date.

Using find criteria such as Toms and the addition of some new data types to the Rootsmagic find options should allow for the production of much ore useful reports such as illustrated above. Places and their proximity in time are such an important clue in genealogy research it cannot be stressed enough so hopefully finds that facilitate a user defined proximity of events will become a reality in the not too distant future.