The map: places, journeys and old borders

Every event with a place shows up on the map — births, marriages, deaths, emigrations — and a person's events join up into a life path you can follow across the world. A time slider (with playback, up to ×48) moves the whole picture through the years, and Filters group events into five toggleable families: Births, Marriages, Deaths, Migrations and Other — the whole-family map opens with the first three on. It all works offline: the world map and a place index are built into the app.

Putting your villages on the map

Open the map and the Places panel. It greets you with a work list sorted by usage — placing the top entries lights up the most pins. Click a place and you get its editor:

• Find the place — type a refined query (add the region or country in the details below to narrow it) and pick the right village from the candidates, instead of trusting someone's top hit. Searching online is strictly opt-in; the offline index alone already knows towns worldwide.
• Coordinates — for places no gazetteer knows (a vanished hamlet, a farm), type the latitude and longitude — comma decimals welcome — or just click the spot on the map.
• Place details — region, country, parish, county. They ride into your GEDCOM exports and make future lookups smarter.
• Same place, another name — "Königsberg" and "Kaliningrad" can point at one placed location, so renamed and defunct places don't fragment.

Researching one country deeply? In Settings, under Places & geocoding, you can install that country's full place database — it covers hamlets the built-in index doesn't.

Old borders under the year slider

Your great-grandparents didn't live inside today's borders. Install historical border packs (one click in the Map packs panel) and the basemap follows the year slider: drag it to 1790 and the map draws 1790's countries, with the empires labelled at world zoom. Events sit inside the borders of their time, and the time bar names the era you're looking at.

Mark what the maps forgot

The annotation layer lets you place your own signs: the old church, the cemetery, a chapel, the manor, the mill, the tavern, a farm, a monument. They're drawn markers on the map — toggle them on and off in Filters like any other layer. The old village your records name is still a normal place; annotations are for the landmarks inside the story.

One family's journeys

Open a person's Life story and the map re-tells just their world — and it does it like a narrator, not a ledger. The person at the centre always gets their full route; their spouse gets a quiet dashed line through birth, marriage and death by default; descendants get pins only. That keeps the picture readable even for a big family — and when you want everything, Filters can switch on the spouse's and descendants' full routes. Shared events are drawn once, with everyone's path routed through the same point, playback follows the action, and a generations filter narrows the cast, from just the focus couple to everyone.

Who was there in 1850?

The Snapshot view (Ctrl+5) answers the map's quiet question directly: pick a year and see everyone present then, grouped into households with their ages. What "present" means is yours to tune in Settings — how many years to assume when only a birth or only a death is known, and whether undated people count at all. The map's year slider follows the same rule, so the two views never disagree.

Take the map with you

The toolbar's SVG button exports the current view — year, layers and all — as a crisp vector file, ready for printing or the family chronicle.