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Family Tree Magazine Podcast
Using Google Earth for Genealogy with Lisa Louise Cooke
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In this episode of Best Websites, Lisa Louise Cooke offers tips for using Google Earth for genealogy.
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One of Family Tree Magazine's Best of 2024 is Genealogy software called Goldie May. It can help you speed up your research, untangle your family tree and stay organized. It even has an automatic research log. It does not replace your genealogy programs, but it might replace the sticky notes on your monitor and papers on your desk, all those places you keep your notes and figure out your research.
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There's lots to do for free or.
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You can get a discounted subscription@goldiemay.com familytree magazine that's goldie may.com family tree magazine.
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Welcome to Family Tree Magazine's Best Websites Podcast. This is the podcast devoted to finding the best websites to help you with your genealogy research. I'm Lisa Louise Cook. When it comes to genealogy research, we have two major factors to keep in mind. One is the timeframe in which our families lived, but the second is the location. And those two come together to help us really narrow down specific individuals. So we really need a powerful geographic location based tool to work with to help us find places and put things in context. And a great option is Google Earth. So in this episode we are going to be talking about the Google Earth website. In fact, we're going to talk about two websites. The first one is google.comearth and there you'll find the three different types of Google Earth that you can put your hands on. The first is Google Earth in the web browser. Now that's the most recent version of Google Earth that you can use right there in your web browser. The second is the mobile app and you can download that from any app store onto your mobile device. The third one is the one we're going to focus on today. And that is the downloadable software, Google Earth Pro. This is absolutely free and it really has all the advanced tools, the bells and whistles that you need to do genealogy research. So while the web browser version does many of the same things, it cannot accomplish everything that the software does. So the web browser version is at the second website that I told you about and that is earth.google.com but I'm going to have a link to google.com earth in the show notes for you today because that will take you to these three different versions of the program and that is where you can click through and get the link to download Google Earth Pro for free to your computer. Now, you might already have Google Earth on your computer, but it has been updated. The Pro version has been free for the last couple of years. So you want to just make sure that you have the most current version now after years of writing about Google Earth, I have talked about it in all three versions of my book, the Genealogist, Google Toolbox, and the Family Tree University course Google Earth for Genealogists. I have a lot of ideas for you on ways that you can use Google Earth for free to do not only genealogy research, but but genealogy storytelling. And that's a wonderful thing when our research tools can also play a big role in helping us convey what we've learned and in a very compelling way to our family members who are maybe not genealogists. So let's talk about a number of things that you can do with this program right away. The first thing that is unique and special about the software program is that it includes a number of historical maps from from davidrumsey.com now the David Rumsey collection is huge. And Google went to them and said, hey, how about giving us access to maybe 150 or so of these historical maps that are historically important and also worldwide. And that is what you will find in the Layers panel of Google Earth. So if you go down to Layers and you open click on the gallery, there's a nested menu there and you can click to activate the David Rumsey historical maps. This will put little icons on your screen. They look like a little gold navigation medallion. And when you click on that, you're going to see which map is available to you. It'll tell you the date, it'll tell you where it came from, it'll even have a link over to the David Rumsey website. But with a simple click of the image itself in that pop up window, it will fully display that historical map for you right there on the Google Earth screen. And this is really tremendous because it is georeferenced to attach to the modern day map as closely as possible, as accurate as perhaps that historical map was. Which means that you can sort of time travel between the current day location and back in time to whatever the year of that map was. Each time you turn on and activate a historical map, you will notice over in the Places panel that there is an opacity slider. When you slide that little button, you're going to see the historical map fade out so that you can see the modern day map underneath of it. And this we call layers. And that's the beauty of this is you could even have multiple maps layered over the top of each other, giving you that time travel experience that you know, going from 1750 to 1840 to 1910 to 2025. And that is just a huge help, particularly In a location like Germany. Germany had many changing boundaries over the decades and centuries. And being able to layer the historical maps and follow along while targeting perhaps your ancestors village, that can really help a lot. Helps show you what the jurisdictions were so that you kind of know where at any given time frame you would need to go to access records. So the historical maps are tremendous. And one little pro tip for you is that each time you click on the David Rumsey icon, you will notice there is a link that will take you to more David Rumsey maps. When you click the link, they will all load up in the temporary places panel over on the left hand side of the screen and then you can save that to your places panel. And that's going to give you access to hundreds of additional historical maps again around the world on Google Earth. So don't miss the historical maps. And there is another historical feature in Google Earth. If you fly to a particular location on the map and you kind of want to see what's been happening in the last 10, 20, 30, maybe even 50 years, historical imagery is a way that you can take a look at that. You'll find the historical imagery button up in the toolbar and when you click that, you're going to be able to kind of go back in time. Now, this is based on satellite imagery, so it's not the same as the old historic maps that have been digitized and included in the David Rumsey collection. This is satellite imagery that Google has had access to and it shows over time. It'll show you the year of each one, how things evolved. This feature is also available over in the web version. But again, I would really recommend do all your work in the software because over time you're going to be building places and tours and overlays and old maps and you want to keep them all together, make that your workstation for your genealogy research. And I just mentioned overlays. That is another thing that Google Earth can do for you. So if you find an old historic map, but it's not part of the David Rumsey Web, but it's not part of the David Rumsley collection that's included in Google Earth, perhaps you found a map on another website and it's digitized and you can download it to your computer, wouldn't it be nice to be able to bring that into Google Earth and include that in your collection? Well, you can do that. You can download that image. You need to host it somewhere online. There's a variety of ways to do that. If you have a little bit of web development know how or you have your own website, you could host that image there. Sometimes the website you get it from will have the direct link to the actual image. That image may be a JPEG file or a TIFF file, it would be an image file or a png. Many times that's not really feasible, but you can upload it to your own website or another photo sharing type of website and that will give you a link that you can use and bring into the overlay. That's actually one of the things that I teach specifically step by step in the Google Earth for Genealogist course at Family Tree University. It's a little bit more advanced to do, but once you get the hang of it, oh my gosh, that is just going to really explode. Your ability to look at a variety of locations that pertain to your family history throughout history. So our first item that you could do was you could access the David Rumsey maps in Google Earth. The second one is you can create your own map overlays and use them in just the same kind of way. A third thing that you can do is you can take data from the Bureau of Land Management website, the GLO website, where you can search for your ancestors land patents and you can take that data and plot that in Google Earth. So what's that going to do? It's going to draw the lines and the borders around the exact property that's being described in this historical document over at the blm. And this again is fantastic because you can now visualize where your ancestors farm was, let's say. And that can make a big difference when you're trying to find records, you're trying to figure out where did they go next? Because as we're plotting the places where they lived, we're starting to see a story emerge, we're seeing a pattern of the path in which they followed. And it would make sense to look at the terrain around it, look at the bordering counties, look at the bordering states. All of this comes together to help us make decisions and get clues to finding more records and finding more families. So plotting land patents, I think is a wonderful strategy, particularly for people who had farms and ranches, because they may not have a specific street address. You look at them in the census and you think, oh, there's no address here, there's no way to find where they were. But if you have the land patent or other legal land descriptions, you can plot those in Google Earth. The final area I want to really bring home to you. And this is really the Power of this program is the storytelling ability. So think of it over time. You are plotting the different locations where your ancestors lived, where they worked, where they went to school, where they married, where they were buried. All of these things can be marked in Google Earth using place marks brought together with old maps surrounded by the outlines of the land holdings that they had. So you're really seeing a story emerge. And while this is helping you analyze your research and find new clues, it's also becoming a pretty compelling visual story. And when we think about, you know, our kids, our grandkids, our nieces and nephews, they're all using Google Earth. It's usually some point during their, their education and so they're going to be familiar with this. And this is a wonderful vehic, cool to share family history with them. And there's actually two really exciting ways to do it in Google Earth, again absolutely free. The first is you can create what we call tours. And I kind of coined the phrase years ago when I wrote the first, when I wrote the first edition of my book, the Genealogist Google Toolbox, I called it Family History Tours. And what that is is after you've put in the place marks, and just so you know, in a place mark, you don't have to put just what happened there, you can embed videos, you can embed photographs, images, documents, links to books about that area. I mean, it's amazing what you can do just with a simple pin drop on the map. But after you've done that, you know what you're going to want to do is be able to kind of pull this all together in one folder in your places panel and create a family history tour. And you can save it, zip it up, save it to your computer, and you could email that to your family members. What they'll be able to do is click on that link, it will automatically open the file in Google Earth, provided they have that on their computer. And I'd say most people at some point have Google Earth downloaded onto their computer. If not, you can also send them a link so they could download it for free first, but it will automatically open in that program because your computer knows that it's a Google Earth type file, it's a KMZ file or a kml. And then everything that you had put together on your computer is going to be visible to them. But more than that, they're going to be able to interact with it. Before you send that file, you could record a moving tour. So you turn on the record button and you fly from place to place to place, showing the different items. You can even record your voice using a microphone and explain, here's where they went, here's where they married, and, you know, show them the different locations. When they click the Tour Play button in your file, they're going to hear it, they're going to see it, you're going to be moving around. It's a lot like looking at a video game. So that's just tremendous. This, it's very captivating. It will capture their attention. But most importantly, as they're watching it, if something piques their interest, they can click on a location and your tour will pause and they'll be able to interact. They'll be able to look something up or click more items or search for something themselves. And then they can click the resume button. It'll just keep going and take them to the next location. So they're going to be able to interact with, with that location, with all the tools available in Google Earth, including the content that you've sent them. And it really makes family history just kind of come alive. Now, not everybody's going to be up for interacting with your tour or really understanding that. And you might have folks who would be willing to watch a video, but that's as far as their tech interest goes. And that can be accomplished in Google Earth as well. So back in your Google Earth, on your computer, you're looking at the tour that you've created, all the different components that you've put into your Google Earth. You can use their Movie Maker feature. This is built into Google Earth. It's like a little video screen capture tool. In fact, Movie Maker used to be included automatically on Windows computers. I don't think they do that anymore. But it is built in to Google Earth. So you can click that and again using your microphone, if you want to narrate it, you can. Or you can just make a silent movie if you will, but you can go from place to place, open up the different place marks, display the videos and the, and the photographs and the different elements that you've included, and record it all as a video MP4 file, a very simple, straightforward video file. When it's done, you save that to your computer. You could post that on your own website. You could upload it to social media, you could send it to your family members so that they could watch it as well. So that's a really easy way to share the family's story. You could even incorporate that video, if you're inclined to do so, into a video editor. And then if you want to add other elements or narration or whatever else you want to add to it and make your own little family history story. I really recommend keeping these kind of short and sweet so that they keep people's attention. And you could make multiple ones, almost like chapters in a book, but each one tells its own unique story. So right there you've got four major things that you could do right away in Google Earth absolutely free. Using the historical maps from David Rumsey, creating your own map overlays, plotting the land patents and legal descriptions that you have for your ancestors land and then creating family history tours. Whether it's the interactive video game type of tour or whether it's a video file, there are so many different ways to use Google Earth to not only analyze your research, but tell the story of what you're finding. If you'd like to learn more about this, I will have links in the show Notes. So the first one will be I have have my book that's we also have the Family Tree University course coming up that starts May 5, 2025. That course I'm with you for the whole month and you go step by step each of these items to really produce them out exactly the way you want them. It's very easy to do and one thing I would tell you is you don't need any kind of great tech expertise to be able to use this software. This stuff kind of sounds a little complicated, but it's really not. If you can click a mouse and you can copy and save on your computer, then you can do all of it and I'll walk you through it step by step. And we have a wonderful discussion forum throughout the four weeks of the course. Any point along the way you have a question, you want me to take a look at your project? Maybe suggest some items that you could do. You can post in the message form and I will answer you personally and be your helper along the way of creating these incredible stories in Google Earth Pro. So be sure and check out our show notes page. It's familytreemagazine.com podcast and we'll have all the links and information for you there. I also encourage you to head over to familytreemagazine.com and sign up for our free newsletter. That's a great way to stay up to date on all the new podcast episodes, our articles, the magazine, everything going on at Family Tree Magazine. Again, I'm Lisa Louise Cook and you can also visit me over at my website, genealogygems.com until next time, have fun climbing your family tree.