Ways to Use Google Earth for Genealogy and Family History

[Music] welcome welcome did you enjoy seeing yourself on google earth how many of you saw yourself i had so much fun putting that together i think that uh plotting you on the google earth map was right up there with plotting my ancestors hi i'm lisa louise cook if you are new this is 11 says with lisa this is your 11 o'clock in the morning central time tea break coffee break lemonade break whatever it is uh i will share a little bit with you about this this is not a tea cup it's a it's a mug as you can see and it's got a little story behind it so i'll be sharing that with you today um what we do in this what ends up being about an hour together is we end up taking a break sitting back relaxing meeting up with friends in the chat and talking about genealogy what we love to do and i know that many of you been doing that i'm gonna go over here and take a look look how busy you are okay oh you guys liked it nancy saw herself she did awesome and tracy too that was so much fun i tried to take the little pictures of you as well to put some of them on there that i could find we're going to be talking about google earth i mean as you can see it's a pretty amazing tool it's absolutely free and there is so much that you can do with it in terms of genealogy and family history so what i want to do is i want to jump right into it so that we have some time at the end to answer questions to chat i want to tell you a little story about my mug and we're just going to have a fun-filled day i missed you all we had a wonderful uh anniversary last week helped the kids move to their new home and um it was it was a great time but it's good to be back too so let me see if i can uh get myself over here to go to our presentation to google earth and this is not you know a formal presentation this is really a chance to show you what this workhorse can do and um that's what we're going to focus on so i'm going to try and show you as much as i can at the time that we have and uh first thing we gotta check and make sure is that you have google earth on your computer and you might already have it if you see the little blue globe on your screen then you have the old version you need the new version so uh the new version will be a gray globe on your on your desktop so if you don't have it if you're not sure just google it or go to this address as you can see it's kind of long and convoluted be aware that google earth is now available on chrome there's actually a web browser version this confuses some people because they get to it and they go wow this is not doing anything that lisa said it would do well it's it's a bit of a different animal it has different features to it i think eventually everything will kind of sync up but right now that's not the case what we're really talking about is software okay it's one of the rare things that google would have you download as software most the time we are working just on the cloud so this is going to be software that you're going to download to your computer one time it's going to need to be connected to the internet so you gotta have a good internet connection and um it's yours to use it's absolutely free and while you're using it it's private so it's not like being on their website and and having anybody else see what your activity is it's all private on your computer so um google it you can do download google earth just make sure when you get to that page that you're looking at the software version not the web browser and of course there's an app there's a mobile app as well and no the mobile app doesn't do all the things we're going to do however the mobile app you can upload you know or load your maps that you create in the desktop version you could bring those into the app and then you can look at them and work with them and show them to other people so that's kind of fun okay so we make sure that you've got the current version this is the glo this is the globe i don't know which way i'm pointing um that you should see on your desktop so that you know that you have it and when you open it up you're gonna see this screen oh i i do need a drink okay so google earth has one screen essentially so you don't have to worry about toggling through different areas of the program this is everything you will see on your screen let's take a quick look just orient yourself if you haven't used it before you know one of the things i always ask people in my live classes is you know raise your hand if you've used it and lots of hands will go up and then we say only keep your hand up if you've done more than just check to make sure your house really exists have you done that have you seen if your car is parked out front all right there's a lot more that you can do and it all happens here in the panels and many people will see this and they don't quite know what to do with it we kind of get the search panel that's pretty straightforward but there's a lot of other tools happening in this panel on the side we're going to be looking at several ways to use the panels the the center map is really called the 3d viewer which nobody's going to test you on but that's what it's called and that's where all the action is happening that's where the mapping is happening up in the upper right hand corner of the google earth viewer are the navigation tools and you'll be seeing me kind of using these navigation tools today as i show you different projects here you can you can tilt you can look up you can look down you can look sideways um you can zoom in and out lots of different things that you can do so this is where you're gonna get your perspective if you don't see these tools when you have google or earth up on your screen um take your mouse bring it up to the right hand corner and hover it and they will pop right up okay so they'll they'll pop right up they're trying to give you as much viewing space of the map as possible and that's why they kind of recede into the background when you're not using them at the top of the screen is a toolbar it's pretty self-explanatory um we're going to be using a couple of the different features today but as you can see there's lots of different things here that you can do the good news is you really can't break it you might crash it but you're not going to break it if it crashes you just restart it again right so go ahead and click on stuff people will ask me did you take a course how did you figure all this out i mean i've been doing it for over a decade and i just hacked around and i've really been fearless about trying stuff out and clicking on stuff and if it crashes we restart it so have that mentality with this because you're going to have a lot more fun if you do and you'll probably run into some really cool features but there are techniques that you probably need to not get frustrated and to know how to kind of gear it towards genealogy obviously google earth wasn't built for genealogy in fact the folks at google once got in touch with me and were asking me about it and how they were like we never thought anybody would ever use this for family history how could that be but of course you can't so we're trying to take tools that were built for totally different purposes and use them for our purpose so up here in the top of the search panel this is the very top they're kind of divided into three kind of grayed out areas the first one being search you can put in the name of a place you can just put in keywords you can put in latitude and longitude you can put in a street address so go ahead and try whatever information you have you can go ahead and put in the search box click search and it will tell you either we can't find anything it'll take you right there or it'll give you a list just like in search results and it'll say well here's what we found is are any of these yours and so that can be very helpful that's actually really kind of helpful a little quick tip if you're not sure about a village like i was working on a village in east prussia i wasn't sure how it was spelled i wasn't sure you know if there were other villages by the same name putting it into google earth it was interesting to see that it gave me the polish name um it showed me that there was another village not too far away so or it will say did you mean this and so it will give you a different spelling so that's kind of a nice tool to help you um figure out some of these villages so let's navigate okay oh now hold on before i do that i want to read to you lynette's email because when that i saw she's here today uh in the chat she said she's been getting a head start on google earth and i want to read to you her email about what she's been doing because this really leads into it's going to give us a great um platform for showing you the first tech technique she says i know you're on vacation i hope you're having a great time with your grandchildren so whenever you get around to reading this is great i love spending time with you on elevenses thank you i love spending time with you guys too i was especially thrilled to view the google earth for genealogy segment on episode 11. if you're new to elevens is with lisa go check out episode 11 when we're done that was one of the different projects that we shared on ways to get your family interested in family history and she says because she really was particularly interested because she has family from san francisco san francisco is her hometown she says she grew up in menlo park so all of my great grandparents came to san francisco in the mid late 1850s so i decided to jump into google earth and see if i could find the homes of my family there definitely is a learning curve for google earth there is she's right um but i am waiting through all of the help that you have on your website and i just ordered your toolbox book in fact i saw in the chat that she already got her book so she's working on it i was thrilled to see that you'll be doing google earth today on elevenses my great-grandparents george and sarah atkinson's home was located at 1876 15th street san francisco i entered the address into google earth into the search panel and up popped their home amazing very few changes have been made since they resided there over about 100 years ago it's incredible my grandfather's shop was at 1785 15th street they had previously lived at 11 clementine street neither of these places now exist and that's true you'll run into some locations where they've put in a parking lot right so but we can find the location we just may not find the house the dwelling she says but now i have located all the places on the david rumsey 1915 san francisco map although i have not figured out how to add it to google earth i have wonderful large photos of all of these places you can you can create overlays you can also embed them into your place marks so trying to send you a photo so i didn't get the photo but i want to show you the first location she says happy grandmothering lynette has 38 grandchildren i'm so jealous okay let me show you her address so remember she mentioned that she had an address we're going to type that into the search box okay 1876 15th street in san francisco when you click search if that address just is not a correct address it'll tell you we can't find it but she's right it's right there look at that we're zooming in i love this okay so you can literally see the rooftops and we're still in satellite view but you can really zoom in and you can just literally click on the screen and zoom in or you can use the zoom tool we're gonna grab the street view icon it's up in the right hand corner looks like a yellow pegman we call it and drag it you'll see the blue lines drop him on the blue lines and you are staying outside of lynette's family's house pretty fun you know you got to drop the street view guy directly on the blue line or else he kind of falls over and dies or he you know you can't just put him on the house you need to put him on the blue line but we're going to exit out of street view now we're back up in satellite view but we're going to go and look at the 3d buildings if you click 3d buildings look how that building just pops up and look at all the trees i mean some people have really taken the time to do this now this is not available everywhere but pretty much all the major cities have 3d buildings street view is available worldwide but missing in lots of locations as well but i think you'll find it more and more because they just keep adding more and more street view so again i can click and drag on the screen i'm going to come down to the gallery because i want to look at that map she mentioned in the gallery you'll find rumsey historical maps we're going to click that there's a kind of a gold medallion you'll see now i don't see that medallion on the screen so i need to zoom out keep zooming out we were very close to the house now we can see a medallion do you see it down there if we click on that it tells us here's a map from the david rumsey collection if i pull out even further there's actually three in the san francisco area so if you hover your mouse over them it'll tell you what the year is and this one is the one with uh that's closest to the time frame that she was looking for in 1915 so if we click the medallion click the picture of the map okay click the thumbnail picture and it immediately overlays on google earth check this out here is their house back when they lived there very cool we could even turn on those 3d buildings and they pop up right through that historic map isn't that amazing so you can literally see the house standing on the old map i was actually looking at some old city directories and i noticed that this uh temple this trades temple behind them they had a lot of meetings that a lot of folks got together and different organizations met at trades temple so you can learn so much about this area and if you've already been doing city directory research of course now you're going to visualize the places that you've been seeing in city directories so that is my friends how we find the old historical maps in google earth we went into layers panel down at the bottom we clicked on gallery and let me tell you these are all kind of buried in there so don't be gentle with yourself okay it's okay if you can't remember where it is or if you have to kind of hack around and click trying to remember was it in the more category was it in the gallery category make some notes to yourself maybe keep an evernote note to keep track of the things that you like the most but they are there and these come from david rumsey's website there's about 150 old maps worldwide okay so around the world available again street view is available worldwide but not in every location so what you'll find is that street view will be in cities it's getting more and more in rural areas but you're not going to find it probably much in russia let's say so i was doing some research in belarus no i'm not being able to do street view in belarus but there are a lot of european countries anywhere that you're looking just try and see if they have street view it's an ongoing project they're continually adding it and from what i understand google uploads new imagery um not all new but some new integer imagery about every 30 days so if and if even if it wasn't there six months ago you might want to go back and revisit some locations because you might find that street view now exists thank you so much lynette i love that you emailed me and shared with me your story um of course she mentioned she has the book that's got all the step by step there's probably at least six chapters on just using google earth in my book the genealogies google toolbox now in that layers panel we were talking about remember that's at the bottom there were three panels on the side the one at the bottom is layers all of this data is coming from the internet and so we have to have an internet connection to make the map work to also channel this data so if google was to load all of this mapping data into the software it would never function i mean your poor computer would just scream for help so it comes through your internet connection here's a little tip when i'm doing a google earth if i'm really busy and deep in projects i'll put a pause on things like dropbox my backblaze backup just for the time being and try to ease up the usage the streaming of internet services so that it can all kind of go towards google earth and then i just turn them back on when i'm done so you can kind of ease that a little bit but you'll find that there's a lot of stuff in here you'll probably never use and there are some things i want to show you that you can be using almost on a daily basis so how could you use google earth we were talking about what are some of the ways well very simply finding locations like lynette did you have a treasure trove of addresses legal descriptions for land city directories you have so many documents and things already that have locations and this gives you a way to plot them and i really see google earth as kind of a two-fold tool one is it gives me the ability to kind of recreate the story right compile it together and bring it together in a visual story that literally kind of operates like a video game i mean that's why the kids love it so it gives you an ability to do that even if you're a professional genealogist if you do paid work this may be an amazing tool for you to tell back the story that you found in a visual format wouldn't that be amazing to get that along with your written report from a genealogist standpoint it's an incredible analysis tool because again we're being able to look at our data in a new perspective i we think of this as data visualization you can have stacks of documents on your desk and you can go okay well try to correlate this goes with this and you're trying to put it together in your database plot this in google earth in a map and give it geographic context you're going to be seeing things in a whole new way you're going to start making new identifications and and new outcomes in terms of what you're doing because you're going to be saying oh i didn't see these two places are so close oh this makes more sense right i tell you i've done everything from figure out you know where somebody probably moved to to being able to identify old photographs literally so being able to visualize your data in a geographic context makes sense because genealogy is location time frame right these are two key components that give us the zeroing in on our ancestors what else can you do you can convert old addresses so let's say you have an address and you say that doesn't exist anymore you can use things like the old historic maps city directories google earth and pull it together to actually find what is that address today on my website i have a free video google earth for genealogy and i will have a link to all that in the show notes for this episode when i get those published and that's a perfect example of taking an address that no longer exists and showing you how we can use those tools to identify that location and get the current address um of course we have historical maps worldwide we can work with these come from the david rumsey map collection his collection's over 150 000 maps but there's about 150 initially in google earth when you first open it family history tours now i showed you this last week remember it was the burkett family in california that was my great grandparents and we had everything from old maps overlaid that were that i created maps that i pulled out of the gallery i had a polygon where i showed where the the burn area was during the great san francisco earthquake we had place marks showing all the houses we had photographs in place marks that were marked as cameras we could click on them and see pictures we had videos out of youtube so you can just put so much content into a google earth map and do what i've been calling for years the family history tour and it's not just like take somebody on a tour but it's really touring the information that you currently have and as you find things you can add it think about when you publish a book you know it's a print book when you find the next thing you can't just put it in there without completely republishing the book a google earth map can be built upon over time and i think that's an exciting element to it that gives you more flexibility creating map overlays so these are digital images of old maps and creating those in an overlay which we will find that is that button is in the toolbar at the top of the screen being able to either have those on your computer or host on the cloud and then shown through the overlay function on google earth and we can do things like plotting out neighborhoods i did this once i took the burkett neighborhood and i plotted it over three different censuses so every 10 years i went back and i put color-coded houses in each area and put who's the family living there now interesting so see you could do layers through time creating maps that show an evolution of an area of a family you can color code it to be able to see it i mean the possibilities are limitless i wish we had all day all right you could what if you had an old legal land description you can convert those into plotting them onto the map and then also determining what is the current modern day address for that location you can even create videos so when you have a family history tour that you've worked hard to put together but you have some relatives who maybe don't want to use google earth google earth now has two different ways that you can create video if you will in the program one you can do through their movie maker feature which is built in and creates an mp4 or wmv file a digital file you can also create a tour which is interactive it you save it as a google earth file which means you could then email it to a family member they click it if they've got google earth on their computer it opens it and it reveals the tour and it literally shows them as you recorded the tour you went to each place and you showed them different things maybe you even recorded your voice explaining what was happening they can see all of that live on their google earth and at any point during the tour they can even click and it will pause and they can go in and they can dig in further and look around and then just resume your tour so it's truly kind of like a video game in that it's very interactive so it's not real digital video but it's like video and of course you can solve tons of location based questions and i think after our time today you're going to be looking at your research in a new way you're going to be saying is this a question i might be able to answer with location information hopefully google earth can help and of course identify where old photos were taken i did a new presentation at roots tech this year i've had some issues with my computer so i'm still trying to finalize the video that i'm going to put on premium membership but it's three different cases that i solved and google earth was one of the tools that i used to be able in fact i used it in two of the cases to help solve who were these people where were these photos taken it's amazing so you can also create a historical map collection i know many of you are premium members on my website and if you are log in and go under premium videos to geographic there's a lot of different topic tiles if you click geographic you'll find a video it's a our class and we will build your you a historical map collection so it's going to be pulling maps from all different places it's going to be the ones that are built in we're going to organize them in your plant places panel you can create your own overlays and so much more so that's a class don't miss that if you have premium membership and even creating kind of time travel maps which i alluded to and i was talking about the census you know showing through time how does an area evolve layering different old maps adding place marks to show where people are living and who they are you could really create a very interactive time travel type experience and in fact there was a time travel video in the premium membership as well okay so what other tools are in that toolbar and things that you can use there are things like automated paths so you'll find that in the toolbar it has little dots connecting the path is a way to show my ancestors lived in east prussia they went to antwerp to the port and they got on a boat they landed in ellis island they took the train out to gillespie illinois and eventually moved to california that path as i plot each location you can literally click the play button and it will take you on that journey it will move you through the path so that's kind of cool polygons we talked about you can create any kind of shape you can put colors on the shapes you can put text hd images with text so if you find a location and you think i really want a nice picture of this and i don't want just a screen shot on my lap on my desktop keyboard you can create an hd quality image now that's one of the features in this new newest version the gray globe we talked about is technically it was google earth pro and you used to have to pay like 400 for it it is now the standard it is now the free version for everybody and it includes these hd images you can create and print pdfs you can email your maps to people cemeteries you can i'm going to show you how you can find old cemeteries churches that maybe your ancestors attended um you can even in the layers panel click roads and rail lines to see where are are all these things in conjunction with the areas that you're looking at i know it's amazing how much there is right so let me show you cemeteries and churches um i'm going to take you to wayne township indiana and this is one of the map overlays that i created so there's the overlay button up there just so you see that that's there when you click it there's a little box and you can upload images and things i am going to if i want to change my overlay i would right click on it and do properties that's how you reopen it that's one of the most confusing things about google earth is how to reopen something that you've already done right click on it and do properties um or yeah pretty much that's it you can also do it through the main menu okay so here we are now i want to see if there's cemeteries in the area so i'm going to go down to gallery and this last item is called more it's very nondescript we're going to click place categories go past the bars and the restaurants go all the way down to the end of the list and click places of worship now when you see the arrow that tells you there's a nested menu in there click to open that up and click cemeteries okay now at first you might not see anything don't panic we're gonna look around if you don't zoom out a little bit or zoom in to see if they pop now i'm seeing them do you see the little um it's a little icon for cemeteries it looks like a pine tree and when you zero in on that and click it here's the pleasant ridge cemetery so if there's information on the web if there's a website you'll see it in this case this is a very small family area cemetery there's no information on the web so we'll just close it but we're going to zoom in and take a look now this is a fairly rural area but we're going to try street view and if we see blue lines we will have it we do okay so we're going to drop the street street view guy on the blue line and now you're staying outside the cemetery pretty cool remember when you're in street view if you want to get out of it click exit straight view up in the upper right hand corner and we're going to zoom out using that zoom tool okay we're doing the negative zoom out and if you want to go back to north just double click if it looks like the map is off double click the n at the very top of the navigation that'll put you right back up straight okay so here are other ones um let's go closer into town so here is dayton national cemetery this one yes they've connected all the web result information for that site right in the box kind of nice you can click that there's a link it'll take you to their website you could check and see when are they open what are their where are their records all that kind of stuff it'll bring it up either in the web browser outside of google earth or it will bring the web browser into google earth that's controlled in the options for google earth so depending on how you like that to happen back here in google earth i'm going to click this cemetery well let's see let's turn on churches click the churches box i still have cemeteries on that's fine the churches has a little different icon so i can tell them apart so here's if you hover your mouse over each church icon you can see what the name of the church is and if you find one that's of interest click it again if there's a website if there's images online you're going to see those right there in the box and we're going to um zoom out here there you go so sometimes if you're going well i know they were methodists let's say but i don't know where they went to church wouldn't it be interesting to go into google earth and find where they lived maybe even find where they're buried and then turn on the churches and see where are the closest methodist churches in this area could help you solve a problem if you want to turn all these icons off if you've ever opened google earth and you've noticed oh my gosh what is this mess you're gonna uncheck the very top of the layers panel that's the primary database that turns everything off it'll just get all out of your way and you can start fresh again you can also turn things off by item or even the folder of items so if you have ever seen all that junk you'll know that gets near way you want to turn that off i want to show you a really neat way that one of my readers used this idea so they kind of combined the idea of finding cemeteries and doing family history tours and he said he was researching at this gloucester new gloucester cemetery so he literally had taken pictures of all the different tombstones with his gps camera and he plotted them in here with markers pink for girls and blue for boys and then he put a link in each place mark to take you to find a grave because he was already uploading all the pictures all the information he was gathering to find a grave he was like wouldn't it be awesome to have that linked right into my google earth map and i could refer to this at any time and see how families are grouped in fact he said when he went back to his hotel that night he said there were two people i couldn't find but after i plotted it that evening and looked at it it was clear to me where i should be looking in the cemetery based on how i saw the groupings of the place marks because i knew which family they were part of he said i went back the next day and i walked right to the right spot it was amazing so see there's an a tool that a genealogist could use and if you're already making the effort to put things on billion graves or find a grave or whatever why not you know give yourself just a little more information who knows when you might want to be able to refer right back to this again in the future with another question so i love that we can build these data visualizations of our research yep there we go all right is your head swimming yet it's kind of cool how many different things that you can use and things that are built in that nobody thought about for genealogy but for us they're perfect if i need to see the name of a road if i need to see the name the the current street address if i want to find the churches if i want to buy the cemeteries all of this is in google earth now you can really use it to explore your ancestors lives and historic maps wow those really bring a whole new perspective because as you saw with the 1915 map in san francisco some of these old maps they've literally drawn each building and they've named it and they've told you what the purpose of that location was i mean these maps are really just invaluable and um you've got things like a census record where oftentimes particularly for towns if you kind of tilt your head and for the more recent census records not the older ones you kind of tilt your head you can actually see this they've written the street name on that side so again does it cover everything no no two ancestors no two families no two locations no two decades is alike so can it do meets and bounds have i heard that in the chat i don't even have to look i'm guessing somebody asked no you cannot put any meats and bounds information in the search box and have it pull up a location but can you be a detective can you pull different information from different resources and kind of detect your way around and snoop and you might be able to find where that land is so look at the documents you have look at the information you have and see what kinds of details are within that particular collection and see how you can incorporate that into google earth my goal today is just to say here's what's possible you know how they say you don't know what you don't know well if you know that it's out there then you can in the back your mind it goes off six months from now and says oh google earth could do that okay now you have another tool in your toolbox that's my goal so let's talk again for a moment about the historical map collection because i just think this is um so invaluable and i have more to share with you um in terms of how many maps there are so initially when david rumsey was approached by google they asked him to pick about 150 maps that were worldwide kind of representative of important locations important time frames in history and they they range from 1680 all the way to 1930 they've been geo-referenced what this means is when you turned on that map it didn't just slap itself on the screen and you know it doesn't actually line up with what's going on they've taken the time to line it up to the best as you can considering how old maps may not be that accurate they line up the streets and the towns and the railroads and all those things and and get it on there so when you click it you're going to get it as close as possible and at least have a really good sense of the general area so that's geo-referencing and they continue to digitize these maps like i said he's got 150 000 in his personal collection i think they're up around 90 000 it's probably even higher at this point that they have digitized and put on his website for free so that's pretty cool but i want to show you where you can find even more before you have to go to his website here we click to medallion remember we turned it on the gallery look at this little link at the bottom of the box this is in every medallion box get the rest of the maps when you click that link go over to your places panel and you'll see down in in the last folder it's called temporary places there's that file it's just dropped a file almost like a gallery file in your places panel places that's your stuff nobody can see that that's just your maps in here you're probably going to get at least another 300 maps they're all organized by location so it starts with continent then country and you can kind of zero in there i've noticed every so often they even add new ones so it doesn't hurt to go back and kind of re-look at that every so often just to see if there are new maps available that you can download but as you can see france germany um switzerland the uk um spain all around the world okay north america africa asia it's amazing again they can only share maps that actually exist so there may or may not be exactly the map you're looking for but this is a wonderful collection i'm going to close it up drag it and drop it up to the top of the places panel under my places these are all of your current maps and you can organize these you can put these into folders you can drag and drop things wherever you want them to be okay temporary places is when you open it'll put it in temporary now we're going to do file save my places google earth doesn't auto-save so you want to make sure that you always do file save save my places and give it a moment it takes a while because it's a pretty strong program to save that up for you so when you're in the gallery and you're clicking rumsey historic maps and the icons come on the screen instead of just looking at the map you clicked look at the bottom of that box for that link download the rest of the historic maps the rest being another 300 to 400 that number varies i haven't sat down and counted them all but there's a lot of maps in there anytime you open a google earth file whether it's been sent to you whether you've opened it in the gallery it's going to go in your temporary places that's always at the bottom of the places panel places are your stuff your files then you can drag and you can move these around wherever you want to put them so so far in well just this 40 minutes you've spent with me you've gotten about 450 work we're closing in on 500 old maps 400 to 500 old maps so you have a lot to look forward to i think you'll be busy tonight you think if you look at these maps and you're looking at your research question that you're working on you think this just isn't going to you know isn't covering exactly what i want you can go to davidrumsey.com and there you're going to find all those maps he's been digitizing and putting on his website he makes these available for free to not only look at and use but download you can download these to your computer so you are free to use them in your projects and um you can create map overlays with them some will be geo-referenced many will not so you'll have to do the geo-referencing yourself which is one of the things i teach in the book it takes a little bit of patience once you get the hang of it um it it really becomes kind of fun it's like doing puzzles uh in my google earth video collection i also show it to you so it's nice you can read about it get the step by step on the book but the videos will show you step by step how to do it but take advantage of these go in and search in davidrumsy.com and i have a little resource for you to help you do better searching when you first get to his website you see a search box at the top and a lot of people jump in there and then they go this is not i'm not finding what i need i have an article for you uh at my website uh this article is called the best way to find old maps for genealogy at the david rumsey website i'll have a link for that in the show notes i will today copy it into the video description for this video so it's there until i get show notes published by tomorrow or you can also just go to my homepage genealogygems.com and in the start learning menu click the menu and then select maps it should be one of the first ones i think that article will show up on the first page i have a lot of articles for you that's a real good step-by-step the right way to search rumsey and be able to download the free maps for your use so i hope you enjoyed that um you're probably wondering about these place marks these little containers that we're putting our stuff in really quickly this is place marks the place marks at the top of the screen kind of looks like a push pin like a yellow push pin and again when we create anything it goes in our places panel that's our stuff nobody can see it it's kind of like organizing your hard drive but these are just your google earth files what can you put in a place mark you can type in text you can add photographs in other types of images documents um you can put embed code the code from a video most videos on youtube if you click share you'll see the word embed that's the code you need to copy and paste into a place mark to make a video to put videos into place marks i should say even in google books you know you if you find an old google book that's been digitized you can copy the share embed code and put that in a place mark so people can literally reference a book right there in the map i love it everything comes together and you can copy and paste web links so these are clickable so people can click them and it will take them to websites so lots of different content um different ones take different kind of techniques to put them in there but it's if you know how to click copy and paste you essentially have all the skills you need to be able to put things into place marks oh my gosh the dad was running by let's show you how to add a place mark real quick we're going to go back to wayne township now this has my great great grandfather's farm on it henry burkett so there's his hundred acres i wanna put a place mark to show where his house was so i'm gonna click the push pin see the box that pops up tells me i can put whatever information i want in here i'm going to click the house and or the push pin and put it in the middle of the farm and then i can type what is this place this is henry burkett's farm i could put the year i could put source citation for where i got this information in the description but i'm going to click the little image of the place mark and i want to select a house you can customize place marks to better represent what they stand for and the kind of information that people will get if they click them so help guide people with those um so i'm going to click ok that's going to close up the place mark and now i have the house in the middle of his farm so when i turn these on i'm going to be able to see very quickly where it was now i'm going to turn the overlay off i want to turn this map so we just see the modern day map this overlay was from 1881. you can see right here that is the farm now if you look you can visually see where the house is i'm going to take street view guy and see if there's street view yes there's a blue line even out in the farmland and when we drop him on the blue line we are staying outside of henry briquette's farm there it is i love it okay you can use your mouse to drag the screen around look up look down you can put your mouse up in the right hand corner and use the navigation tools you can click on the road and it will zoom you down the road and then you could grab the screen and turn again to see the location very cool up in the right hand corner you're going to see there is the street address for this location what it is today and down at the bottom you'll actually see the latitude and longitude no matter what you're looking at you'll always see latitude and longitude showing at the bottom of the screen and if we want to leave street view we can click exit street view so now that i kind of know where the house is i think i want to move my place mark right get it into a little better spot how did we do that when we have already set something we want to right click on it on a pc of course and um there's our old map there's our house i'm going to right click i can do it here on the icon itself click properties that opens up my dialog box again so i can change it so i can click and drag if i try to click and drag it without that open it will not move now i've got it in the right spot pretty cool and of course i'm going to always save do file save save my places so that you have this for years to come as you're doing your research and as you can see i could really start to add a lot more information to this whole map that i'm building about where he lives i'm going to click and drag and drop that house up into my burkett folder if you want to make a folder you can do it through the menu system or you can right click on anything and do add folder so right click on my places do add folder and then you can start grouping because very quickly you're going to find um you're going to want to group your your place marks and your items i found that i like doing it by surname but you could also do it by time frame you can also do it by locations think about how you're organizing things on your digital hard drive we've talked about that here on the show and click and drag and drop this other item in here as well here's a final tour if you didn't get a chance to see last week's or two weeks ago uh the episode 11 i want to show you a new family history well it's not a new family history tour but it's a different one i showed you the briquettes in san francisco last time this is a quick little tour that i put together about my husband's great grandfather harry cook so i could put a place mark that actually looks like a little start button you can change them you can customize them you saw it customize some of your place marks in our opening video before we got started today here's a picture right in the place mark so i made the camera the place mark and then have the picture here's where they live that was harry cook so down here at the train station when he first arrived in tunbridge wells england this is a postcard from that year digitized and in the place mark i even found a train icon which was great and i did a quick search on youtube i found an old video about the history of tumblr dwells and it it actually showed um the old train station it had video from years ago what it looks like today it was really fun so i clicked share and i copied that embed code and got it into the placemark and of course i made the placemark look like a movie camera or a movie projector so that if i share this with another family member they're going to kind of have a sense oh i bet you i might get to watch something if i click that then uh he moved to five mount field road so i put a place mark with a house and that's where his son raymond was born that's um and i'm gonna look at street view okay so we're gonna click it here's the blue lines we drop it on the street and you're standing outside of 5 mount field road you can see that this is not only exhilarating and inspiring for yourself for your own research but what a wonderful way to share the story with a client with a relative with one of your grandkids somebody that you want to get interested in family history here's a picture harry is staying over to the left he's helping to show the new horseless carriages in england when they first came to england at the sir david solomon's broom hill estate and then he was moving up in his career so he moves to a new home at 13 newton road and i even clipped a picture of the census just his entry again if i want to show this to a non-genealogist in my family they don't want to see the whole census but they would be interested to see just that entry so i clipped that image and then of course you can stand outside his house at 13 newton road i i love this you know i tell people when bill and i first uh i went to speak at who do you think you are alive in london and i said we got to go to tumblr dwells for a week and when we got there it was like coming home we'd already been there in google earth so we knew where the shops and the pubs were we knew where the houses were and it and everything that we collected all the videos we took we could just keep adding them to the family history tour i hope you're excited about this i have not lost my enthusiasm for google earth after all these years i continue to find things i can't believe like i said most recently the photos i've been able to identify using it it's just amazing how do you remember it all well i have resources for you and i have to apologize to you on the show notes i published for the last episode i think i totally put the wrong coupon code for the google earth videos i know it was a blonde moment i've extended it it's there and i've added the book so if you want to learn how to do it the code is earth 11. think of 11z's and earth google earth it's earth 11 at the store at genealogy jumps.com so uh the book was just published this year in january so it's all current and up to date and the videos will show you what you're learning in the book get that right this time all right let's jump back here i want to see what you guys have been doing i'm guessing that you've had some fun let's see places i know very well andrew says yes awesome i hope that you guys have been putting if you have questions and i know there's probably a lot of questions because i'm just giving you an overview of kind of what it can do for you a couple of the how to's things on your checklist tonight and this week will be to try out the gallery um go and download the rest of the historic maps get those into your places panel why don't you do add a folder at least one folder in your places panel practice saving because remember it doesn't save for you and create some place marks you know i think it'd be really fun to one of the easiest projects that you can do is just go in and map out your childhood how about your story go on and tell your story where were you born where was the hospital where is the house where did you move to what was your favorite place to go to and why not even go to youtube and do some searches on the history of your old hometown and see if you can find some old videos if you don't have your own home movies i'm so glad you've been enjoying it ah some people are fascinated that's very very cool um let me see here i did something and i wanted to show you let me bear with me because i want to see if i can do this correctly here i have a video where is it no okay keep talking to each other because i i really want to show you this video it's kind of cool hold on so i'm going to copy this i don't know if i can do this right duplicate all right let's try it if it doesn't work i'm going to put it on this little video on the show notes page for you but we'll see if i can get it on here there's always something always something let's see place marks oh yes okay i think this is going to work you guys are so patient but you know what i just think this was really fun and i don't know if it's going to work okay hold on i'm moving my i don't know if you can see it all okay i wanted to show you if you like to shop here's a really fun place to go shopping it's in kentucky it's in louisville and it's kind of interesting there's a bed bath and beyond here in louisville in fact when you're going to street view you can see it's lots of stores people are starting to get out into the stores these days starting to get out of the house so that's kind of fun but if you're a member of the berks family you might be interested in something else you can't really shop for the berks family but there is something else in this shopping center in louisville for you we're going to exit out of street view and look around the parking lot there it is this my friends is the berks family cemetery and no the cemetery i don't think is in google earth look at this there is one tiny little gate you can peek through otherwise when you drive another into the shopping center all you see are the hedges so if you're not there in person the only way to really view this cemetery is with google earth to get above it isn't that amazing and yes if you click it oh google knows where it is burke's family cemetery so i had to click the reviews why is somebody reviewing a cemetery he says there's lots of parking but it's kind of dead at night okay i couldn't help myself oh my gosh i couldn't help myself you guys are i know i'm silly all right i have to tell you about my mug this is laura ingalls wilder her home and museum in mansfield missouri i had an opportunity to go out there this is where the little house books began have you ever been to springfield well springfield it's nearby wonderful wonderful place there's actually a couple of different laura ingalls wilder locations around the u.s i grew up on her books i think it's a huge reason why i love genealogy because it just dawned on me holy smokes do i have any pioneers in my family and that really kept me going through my grade school years um and my interest in family history and i have to share with you her desk this is where she wrote the first books at rocky ridge farm so pretty fun i hope that you had some fun today that you learned something new that uh you'll leave me a question in the comments if you have a question if you want to save chat and this is my last question for you today do you want a chat download in the show notes i know some of you said you don't always see the chat after the live video is over and would you be interested is that something that you want there's two things we can do one i could i always download it so i can put it as a download on the show notes page the other thing that you can do is you can go to the web store for your web browser like if you're on chrome you go to the chrome web store and search for save live streaming chats for youtube just put in youtube live chats it'll pop up i've put that on both my computers and when you slide the little button before the show begins it saves it for you so let me know i don't know some people have said you know gosh i went back and the live chat was gone and i wanted i didn't get a chance to read while you were talking and showing me things so i hope you had fun wonderful to see you again i can't wait to go in and read all of the chat and we will meet here again next week um have a happy happy day make somebody else very happy in your life today okay i'll talk to you soon [Music] [Music] you

Channel: Lisa Louise Cooke's Genealogy Gems

Views: 11,104

Rating: 4.98 out of 5

Keywords: genealogy, family history, lisa louise cooke, ancestry, genealogy research, genealogy podcast, geneology, how to find your family history, family tree, google earth, google earth for genealogy, old maps, historic maps, map overlays

Id: GXAXnDl54qY

Length: 61min 29sec (3689 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020