The ancestor map answers “where did they come from.” The Journey Builder answers a different question: where did one person go, and when? It is built for the ancestor whose life you can follow through the records — a migration west, a stretch of military service, a life that touched multiple counties, states, or countries.
You start by naming the person, then add their stops one at a time. Each stop has room for what happened, when, where, and — the part I think matters most — a note and a source. It is the same discipline you would use in a research log, except the result is a map. When you come back to it years later, or when a reader asks how you know, the evidence is sitting right there beside the pin.
Dates are as precise or as vague as your records are. A year on its own is fine; add the month and day when you have them, and there is an hour field for the rare occasion when two events happen on the same day and the order matters. Stops can be found by name or placed by clicking the exact spot. Nothing rearranges itself while you type — if the dates end up out of order, the tool says so and offers to sort them, but only when you ask. The order you see is the order of the journey.
The map draws the route in sequence, numbered and arrowed, so the direction of travel is never in doubt. A timeline walks through it a stop at a time. The statistics panel adds up the total distance travelled, the longest single leg, and the years the journey covers, which has a way of making an old migration feel a good deal less casual than it looks on paper.
The shareable page you download at the end carries the map alongside a readable itinerary of every stop, with your notes and sources. Your reader can click any stop in the list to fly to it, or click any point on the map to jump to what you wrote about it. That is the version to send to family — it reads as a narrative, not a database.
Click the button to try out the Journey Builder tool and other mapping tools that I’ve created and added to my website.
Questions, thoughts, other mapping ideas? Leave a comment!
