Exporting Map coordinates & Family Movement

[oz1]

I am interested in mapping movements of a group of family members over several generations. I have the residential addresses geocoded. I don't think I can do this in Reunion. Is there a way I can export a list of geocodes for a person or a group of people so I can import them into a geographic information system?

[Chris Perry]

Re: Exporting Map coordinates & Family Movement

I am interested in mapping movements of a group of family members over several generations. I have the residential addresses geocoded. I don't think I can do this in Reunion. Is there a way I can export a list of geocodes for a person or a group of people so I can import them into a geographic information system?

I don't know of a way to export the geocodes from Reunion but the program "Family Atlas" from Rootsmagic will import a GEDCOM file and then allow you to map the movements of family members. Unfortunately Family Atlas will insist first on doing its own geocoding as part of the GEDCOM import thus negating the value of having already geocoded in Reunion.

[oz1]

Re: Exporting Map coordinates & Family Movement

I don't know of a way to export the geocodes from Reunion but the program "Family Atlas" from Rootsmagic will import a GEDCOM file and then allow you to map the movements of family members. Unfortunately Family Atlas will insist first on doing its own geocoding as part of the GEDCOM import thus negating the value of having already geocoded in Reunion.

I had a look this program but,as you say, it does it's own geocoding. The problem I have with this is that quite a few of my addresses from 19th century UK have long disappeared as a result of WW2 bombing, slum clearance schemes,city redevelopment etc. Programs that search address databases either throw up spurious results or no results at all. my approach with these is to use old street maps to identify locations & to get coords for those points from GoogleEarth. I then manually enter these values into Reunion.

So far, the only way I've found of mapping movements of more than one person on a single map via Reunion is the following (but it's very cumbersome & not at all elegant).

1, I create a series of events ... Residence 1, Residence 2, etc with associated dates. These contain addresses on a census by census basis for a single person..

2.I then use Reunion to map these. This produces a map in a browser window. The browser can then be used to save the html (javascript) code for the map as an html file. That code contains the geocodes, event labels, etc. I create one of these files for each person of interest.

3.I then edit the html file to add the data for each person of interest & generate a new file. This generates a new map with locations & lines to indicate movement.

This is not a pretty process so if anyone knows of a better approach I'd be very pleased to hear of it.

There are other (free) mapping tools around like this one:

http://freegeographytools.com/2010/convert-an-excel-address-spreadsheet-into-a-kml-file-and-then-into-a-geocoded-csv-text-file-with-kmlgeocode-and-kmlreport

I'm about to try this approach as an alternative.

[Paul_LCC]

Re: Exporting Map coordinates & Family Movement

I have asked the Reunion folks to add just such a feature.

I want RU to be able to take a town in a birth or death field and create a map that is Flash-based, to produce a map "show" that will start at a certain year, and then slowly highlight a given town on a map, with a name for the person involved, as each year goes by in the "show".

Someday?

[oz1]

Re: Exporting Map coordinates & Family Movement

I have asked the Reunion folks to add just such a feature.

I want RU to be able to take a town in a birth or death field and create a map that is Flash-based, to produce a map "show" that will start at a certain year, and then slowly highlight a given town on a map, with a name for the person involved, as each year goes by in the "show".

Someday?

If only ... however, I think that for the moment I'll have to stick with editing html files. This turned out to be less difficult than expected given that I have minimal previous knowledge of html or javascript.

A couple of tips I've picked up along the way ...

1. Getting coordinates from Google Earth. CMD-Shift-C copies the coordinates of the current cursor location to the clipboard. They can then be pasted elsewhere with CMD-V

2. Editing line colours in html on the maps that R10 generates. R10 maps each movement with a different colour. If you want to change them or make them all the same you need to change the html code. To do this, you need hex codes of the line colours. This utility lets you pick a colour & provides the code:

http://www.zonums.com/gmaps/kml_color/

3. Editing placemarkers on the map. R10 uses the default marker. I wanted to change these. To do so you need to find the lines:
var thisMarker = mapMarkers[i];
var thisLatLng = new google.maps.LatLng(thisMarker[1],thisMarker[2]);

After these, insert a line as follows (for a green pushpin for example):
var Image = "https://maps.gstatic.com/mapfiles/ms2/micons/grn-pushpin.png"

After this, you need to find the line:
markers[i] = new google.maps.Marker({position: thisLatLng, map: map, title: thisMarker[0], html:eventsInfo[i], draggable: true});

and change it to:

markers[i] = new google.maps.Marker({position: thisLatLng, icon: Image, map: map, title: thisMarker[0], html:eventsInfo[i], draggable: true});

This post helped me a lot:

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/4801989/change-google-map-marker

Getting the URLs of the various markers proved a bit of a challenge. However, if you create a map on Google Maps (you need an account & to be logged in), you can then get into edit mode. Add a marker. This produces a small editing window. Click on the mapmarker (top right of the editing window) & select a new marker from the dropdown list. Drag the new mapmarker from the top right of the editing window into the editing window text box. This shows the URL of the marker.