Maps

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Maps

See where events took place, draw on the map, and lay old maps over the real terrain.

Events on the map

The map shows where the events in your tree took place.

Historical maps

Switch the map's appearance to look the way the area did during a historical period, rather than a modern map.

Map overlays

A map overlay is something drawn on the map: a family farm's boundary, a route someone traveled, or an old survey map or photo laid over its real location.

Overlays belong to places

Every overlay belongs to at least one place, and is added from that place's own Map overlays section. One button offers both drawing a new overlay and attaching an existing one.

An overlay can belong to several places at once (a boundary or route that covers more than one, say). It just can't be attached to the same place twice.

Starting from a map file

You can also start from a map file, such as a GPS track of a walk to a family grave, or a parish boundary downloaded from a mapping site. In the place's Map overlays section, + → Upload map file picks one or more .kml, .geojson or .gpx files.

Each file is kept exactly as you uploaded it, in the place's ordinary Media list, and a map overlay is made from it alongside. The overlay is what draws on the map and what you edit. This needs Gramps Web API 3.24 or later to recognize the file types.

Map files already in your tree

A map file that's already in your tree (uploaded as ordinary media, or attached in Gramps desktop) has a Make map overlay button instead. It adds the new overlay to every place the file is attached to.

What's kept from the file

Overlays keep everything the file had: names, descriptions, a GPS track's times, multi-part shapes, and the file's own colours where it sets any. Elevations aren't kept.

A shape the editor can't change, such as a region with a hole in it or one whose outline crosses itself, is shown dashed and saved exactly as it was.

Drawing and editing

The drawing editor places lines, shapes and images. A description is required before an overlay can be saved.

Image overlays

Drag an image's four corners independently (free-transform warping) to line it up with the real terrain. Each image overlay has its own opacity and stacking order, which decides which one sits on top when several overlap, like an old county map layered under a more detailed township survey.

The Overlays panel

Once saved, a live panel on the map lists every overlay, drawn region and line (a route, or a GPS track) on the open place and on whatever it encloses. Opening a state shows its own overlay alongside each of its counties'.

If the next level down has no overlays of its own (say a country whose regions carry no outline but whose smaller divisions do), the panel keeps descending until it finds a reasonable number of overlays or runs out of places.

In the panel you can:

• hide any overlay,
• preview a different opacity for the rest of this session, a quick way to compare a modern map against an old one without touching the saved settings,
• click an overlay to fly the map to fit its full extent.

A child place's shape or image draws on top of its parent's, so a smaller overlay never disappears under a larger one that encloses it.

When an overlay appears

An overlay's visible date range comes from the date on whichever place you're viewing it from. A farm outline with no date shows all the time, while an old map only appears when the historical mode's year falls inside the era its place's name applied.

Overlays with different eras at the same physical spot need their own place records (one for the county-era name, one for the township-era one, say), since a place's date lives on its name, not on the overlay.

Coordinates filled in for you

Saving an overlay fills in coordinates for any of its places that don't have any yet, using the center of whatever was drawn. A place created just to hold a farm boundary or a route ends up on the map without you looking up its latitude and longitude.

When several places share one overlay, each is spread out slightly around that center, so they still show as separate markers. Existing coordinates are never overwritten.

Markers on the same spot

If markers do end up stacked on the same spot (nothing stops two places sharing coordinates by hand), clicking their combined number lists the places underneath so you can pick one.

Arriving from a place

Arriving on the map from a specific place (its own "Map" link, or a Wikidata-imported overlay) opens its detail card with its overlay showing, named on a chip in the header. Clicking empty map to look around closes the card; clicking the chip's label brings it back without finding the marker again.

Looking up a place on Wikidata

Adding a new place first asks how you want to add it: manually, or from Wikidata. Picking Wikidata opens the search right away; picking manual goes straight to the usual fields. Editing an existing place offers the Wikidata lookup as a button instead.

What a lookup fills in

Search by name and confirm a match. Gramps Connect fills in the place's coordinates and creates or links its whole enclosing hierarchy at once (city, county, state, country), each with its own coordinates, instead of you creating and connecting every level by hand.

Names and titles from Wikidata

Each place gets just its own name ("Indianapolis"), never the whole hierarchy, so automatic place titles show it correctly in any place format under Preferences. Its stored title is written in the active place format, so it reads the same when automatic titles are turned off.

Names come in the active place format's language, or the interface language when that format has none. Every other language your place formats use is added as an alternative name, when Wikidata has a different name in that language, so switching to a German format shows "München" rather than "Munich". Search also runs in that first language. A language Wikidata has no name for falls back to a language-neutral or English one.

Outlines from Wikidata

A checkbox on the confirmation screen (on by default) also fetches an outline from Wikidata, when one exists, for each newly created level and for the place being added. A state or country added this way shows its actual boundary on the map instead of just a pin, like a hand-drawn overlay.

Each outline is filled with a color: a hue per place type (country, state, county, city, ...), so every county reads as the same family next to a state's outline, shaded by the place's Wikidata ID so neighbouring places of the same type still look distinct. The outline is labeled with the place's name, both in the overlay's media description and in the Overlays panel.