Last week I was finally able to participate in #genchat again, which was so much fun! The subject of the chat was US migration patterns and so the #genchat challenge was to map your ancestors’ migration across the world, across the country, or even across town. In the chat, Jen had mentioned using Pinterest for this purpose since they introduced a new Place Pin feature back in November. I started to play around with it a bit but since it pulls its places from foursquare, not everywhere I wanted to map was available as a place pin. So instead I went with the Google Maps Engine (which hopefully will embed properly):
The above is a custom Google map marking the migration pattern of Carl Johann Schultz according to the U.S. federal census from 1880 – 1940, as well as the New York State Census of 1915. Eventually I want to update it for his parents, or make a new one, and include their migration to the U.S. from Germany. Unfortunately at the moment I’m still not sure where in Germany they were from (I believe it was Schleswig-Holstein but I’m not positive) so that’s a map for another day.
