Family Historian User Group

I’ve just made a dramatic discovery!!!!
If you have Microsoft AutoRoute (mine is 2002), then you can import all or some of your places and addresses, and provided you have used suitable place descriptions, AutoRoute will add a push pin in the appropriate place on the map.

Here’s the procedure for mapping residential places:

1. In the resident/place field, just have the village/town and county with a comma and space between.

2. The resident/address field can have the full address if wanted.

3. Create a query to get all the places (and addresses if wanted). I’ve used this:
Residence Query

Which will retrieve each individual’s last 5 places of residence.

4. Select the results from the query and paste into MS Excel. This does not seem to copy the column headings, so I inserted a row in Excel and manually added headings. Save the file as something like “Current places.xls”.

5. Start your MS AutoRoute and select Data/Import Data Wizard.

6. Find and select your Excel file, and open. You will probably be asked to select a sheet or range, sheet 1 should be ok, and press next. You will then be presented with your columns from the Excel file. In this example, select the column which equates to “Residence place 1” and press the little down arrow, and select “City”.
Upon pressing the Finish button, the file is imported and you will probably be presented with the “Unmatched Records dialog box” These are places the programme can’t match, so you have to choose the appropriate option.

7. All the Pushpins currently belong to one data-set. If you select one and then select Data/Data Set Properties, you can modify the properties of all that data-set, like change the PushPin style, include additional columns from the Excel spreadsheet, or re-select the record to an alternative location on the map.
If you right click on a selected Pushpin, you can display the person’s name or additionally their full address in a box pointing to the location.

8. If we now go back to the Excel file and rename it and go through step 6 again, but select another column, like “Residence place 2”, then all the new Pushpins will belong to a new data-set which could be identified by a different style.

By using different data-sets, and thereby a different Pushpin style, one can display the location of different events in different styles.

I hope this might be of interest to some of you.

Tim M

Tim, well done, I find the ability to pinpoint locations on a map very interesting and I still use Family Tree Maker for this feature. However, when you have a lot of relatives who lived within a close proximity to each other, the resulting map in FTM becomes too cluttered but with AutoRoute, you have the ability to zoom out to street level. I have previously logged this feature as a 'Wish List' item and your 'discovery' seems to provide the perfect answer but of course only works for UK and European addresses. Maybe Autoroute 2006 will include the rest of the world!!

if you do not have Autoroute is to use GENMAP.
http://www.archersoftware.co.uk/genmap01.htm

instead of cutting and pastin gthe data from the query it is possible with Version 3.1 onwards of Family Historian to export directly to a csv file for import into Excel, a Word document or any other program (e.g. autoroute)

Once the query has run click the small disk icon (if you hover over it it states 'Save Results to File', then you have the option of saving it as a either a CSV file or a TXT file.