Follow Friday - MapMaker

I stumbled across another website that I had saved quite some time ago and decided to dust it off and see what it could do.  That website is MapMaker.


MapMaker is a product of BigHugeLabs, which has some other pretty neat tools - though I haven't really played with any of them yet.


The maps include the entire world, or specific regions (U.S., Europe, Asia, etc.), and all you have to do is check the boxes of the places you want identified on the map, and (as the website says) the map "automagically" updates.  There are options to change colors and stuff, but I didn't mess with that -- mainly because I had no idea what I was doing.  There's some of that newfangled HTML stuff on there for you high-techies.


The site says that you can "Create a map of places you've visited (or want to visit or dream about or know people from) and get HTML code that you can embed in your profile on Flickr, Facebook, My Space, your blog or any other web page."  I thought to myself ... "self, why can't you make a map of where all the people in your tree have been born?"  Self answered, "no reason."  So I did.  Here's what it looks like:

Areas of Research

Make yours @ BigHugeLabs.com


I see no reason why you couldn't do a map of the migration patterns of families within your tree, or any other kind of map you can think of.


It may not be as useful as say ... census records ... but it's still pretty nifty.

Do we share any ancestors? 

 Please email me at lostancestors [at] gmail [dot] com

Follow Friday - TimeToast

While I love the fact that my RootsMagic 5 will do a very nice timeline, I have been looking for a way to do one that is a little more visual (pictures and pretty colors work better for some reason).  So when I stumbled across a link I saved some time ago for TimeToast, I decided to play with it a bit.


You can view timelines for pretty much any period or person in history (here's one for the Space Race), but you can also make your own timelines!


It's not comprehensive, but I added enough stuff to see how all the bells and whistles worked.  Here's my end result:



First (and most important), it's FREE.  Second, it's incredibly easy to use.  Granted, I would love to be able to export my timeline from RM5 to this website (hint hint TimeToast and RM5), but alas, I cannot.


There are a couple of options for creating the timeline.  You can add individual dates or a span of dates.  One drawback I found is that for a span of dates, a day and month are required, which is kinda crappy if all you have are years.


You can add images to your individual entries, but they have to be in .jpg, .jpeg, or .png format.  No PDFs allowed, which is kind of a bummer.  Images cannot be added to time spans.


The timeline can also be viewed in "Timeline" view or "Text" view.  Above is the timeline view.  You can look at the Text view for this timeline here, click on "Text" in the upper right corner of the visual.  I would love to figure out how to embed the text view and the timeline view.  They sure would be nice together on my website.


All in all, it's a neat little website.  Your timelines are public, unless you keep them in "draft" version but then you can't share them.  


For a free site, I don't have a problem allowing my timelines to be public - I just won't put any living people's information up there.  I haven't figured out if you can embed them on WikiTree yet, but I hope that's a possibility.  It certainly would add some visual interest to MY pages (which are incredibly boring right now).  Maybe Chris Whitten is reading ... ??

Do we share any ancestors?

Please email me at lostancestors [at] gmail [dot] com

Follow Friday ... or How To Lose 3 Hours of Your Life In One Sitting

Thanks to Greta for leading me to d kay s days' "Tuesday's Tip" blog post Build a Research Toolbox and Include Cornell’s Making of America, and Apple's comments on the same post, pointing me to another Making of America website at The University of Michigan.  I decided to check them out.  Wow.  Just wow.  Turns out Cornell and U of M collaborated to get the whole project done.  Each site has links to the other.


First, I started browsing the Cornell site ... not looking for anything in particular, just wondering what was there.  I spent at least 45 minutes reading The United States Democratic Review, of all things.  Then I noticed a link that said "browse civil war documents."  Hmmm.  Goodbye, hour and a half.


Then I looked at the U of M site.  The next time I looked at the clock, another 45 minutes had passed.  Seriously, I could spend the rest of the month between these two sites and still not be bored.  They are that fascinating ... even when the information isn't relevant to anything you're researching.


Both sites have the option of searching, or browsing by title, author, or subject.  You can even save stuff to your "bookbag" to email or download later.  Way cool.


So ... my sincere thanks to Greta, dkaysdays, and Apple for giving me yet another excuse for not being able to do my homework! :)


Disclaimer:  Don't claim that you haven't been warned of the addiction potential here.