I’m very pleased to announce Places, a significant new feature at DNA Painter. I’ve wanted to work with maps for a long time. This is not just because they’re visually striking, but because seeing ancestral locations mapped out makes it easier to understand my tree and where I came from. My goal is to provide a birds-eye view of a person’s ancestors that’s both beautiful and informative. Places does this by making use of information in the birth place field in your ancestral tree.
Throw some shapes!
This new mapping feature creates a kind of flight path, where each ancestor’s birthplace connects to the next generation, ultimately leading to you. It shows the journey your genes took on their way to your body.
Whether you have tracked ancestors all over the world or just within one country, the result often produces an interesting visual pattern. The shapes made by the lines connecting you to your ancestor form a personal genealogical signature.
Examples
We all come from lots of different places. Different trees produce very different shapes. Here are some examples of how this can work out.
One country
My father-in-law’s known ancestry is all within the UK
By contrast, looking at Leisa’s map makes me visualize a gigantic magnet pulling all her ancestors to Australia.
My mother-in-law was born in the USA, but her mother was Welsh
Filtering
You can control what’s shown on the map with the following parameters.
Generations
The generations slider controls how many generations you see.
By default, five generations are shown but you can slide the handle over to the right to see all, which can produce dramatic effects!
If you have a sprawling network of ancestors, using the slider to adjust the level of detail can make it clearer.
Family lines
When you click the Places tab, you’ll notice that the last names of the great-grandparents of the root person show in the top bar. There’s also an additional checkbox allowing you to select/deselect all.
- You can use the checkboxes to focus in on the locations from specific great-grandparent lines.
- If you deselect all, the map will show just the root person and their mother and father.
DNA inheritance paths
This filter can be used to filter the map according to your Y- and mitochondrial lines, your X-DNA inheritance path, and to show just your confirmed genetic ancestors.
Dimensions
Back in 2021 I introduced dimensions which lets you apply information in your tree to create new datasets – e.g. birth century and age at death, as well as create your own. Within the tree you can click on dimension name in the menu and a key will appear, with the lines and nodes on the map adjusted according to the values in your dimension.
Map styles
As you might have noticed from the screenshots above, you can choose from a variety of map styles.
As a reminder, within your ancestral tree you can edit colours manually, or choose from a variety of pre-set palettes.
While the default style is Light, certain colour palette and map pairings will work particularly well together, while with others, the lines and nodes might be hard to see.
| Map style | Suggested palettes |
| Light | Brighter selections such as Patient, Rufus, Ancestors |
| Medium | Bright and pale selections such as Heritage, Search, Placer, Runner, and Werner |
| Dark | Paler palettes such as Default, Search, Heritage, Placer, Subo and Rufus |
| Topographical and satellite | Lighter palettes such as Heritage, Default, Search |
How do I start?
To try it out, open any ancestral tree (or create a new one), and look for the new Places tab.
If you open an existing tree, the site will go off and try to find geographical coordinates that match the text strings you’ve entered in the birth place field for each ancestor.
When you click on PLACES, you might see your map immediately, or you might see a message with instructions on what needs to happen first.
Ancestors being fetched
If you have a lot of ancestors, you may see this message for a while. Once the process of fetching the coordinates is complete, the map will appear.
Location for home person needed
If you imported your tree with the default option of hide information for living people, then the root person will not have a birth location. You’ll see a link asking you to enter this information so the map can be shown.
Ancestors from one country
If your ancestors are all (or mostly) from just one country, then you may not have indicated that country within the text you entered in the birth place field.
To have the best chance of fetching these locations successfully, DNA Painter needs to know what country that is, so you will be prompted to type some letters from the country name and selected it within the Places settings overlay.
Why are some of my ancestors mapped in the wrong place?
I thought you’d ask that! Having tried this out with dozens of trees, I’ve figured out that it’s inevitable. Birth place is a free-text field in most genealogy software, meaning you can type what you like as opposed to selecting a location from a list.
Almost all of us will have some locations that make sense to us, but which lack the context needed for the geocoding API to be able to guess the location correctly.
Some examples:
- While working on my tree at some point back in the 2000s, I listed my Isle of Wight relatives as ‘Brading, IOW.’ The geocoder, not knowing what ‘IOW’ meant, placed them in Iowa, USA!
- Patricia listed an ancestor from ‘Kilkenny County,’ but since there’s also a townland called Kilkenny in County Roscommon, the geocoder picked the wrong one due to her placement of the word ‘County’ after ‘Kilkenny’
- Leah had some locations derived from marriage records and transcribed as ‘Of St. James, La’. While this is reasonable in the context of her tree, the geocoder didn’t know she meant Louisiana, and so put these people in Los Angeles!
In summary, geocoding using text strings is unlikely to be perfect. For example, there’s Ontario, CA and Ontario, Canada and they are not the same place.
How can I fix this?
Luckily, fixing locations is very easy. Click on the person and click Edit or add notes. You now have two options:
1. Add a more specific birth location
When you type additional text into birth location field and check the Use to update map coordinates checkbox, the map will use your new text and reattempt geocoding.
2. Add the correct location manually
If you scroll down the edit person form to Coordinates and search within the map, you can click on the result that represents the location you want.
Below the map you’ll also see two additional checkboxes:
- Remove this location
- This is for people whose precise birthplace you don’t know. You might have entered ‘Europe’ in their tree but since this isn’t very precise, you might prefer not to include them in the map at all.
- Use this location for everyone with a birthplace of…
- I built this for locations that appear lots of times in your tree and which are all mapped incorrectly. If you check this box while editing such a location, the site will update all instances of this location with the new coordinates you choose.
Other considerations
The map runs using modern WebGL technology, so performance may vary depending on your device.
You may have noticed that Places has a beta badge. This has been tested a great deal, but I would be surprised if there aren’t still some bugs. If you find any, please email info@dnapainter.com.
Other applications
I’m excited to explore integrating these new geographical maps more with other features at DNA Painter. If there are particular ways you’d like to see this expanded, I’d love to hear from you at info@dnapainter.com.
Spreading the word
If you like this feature, feel free to share some screenshots. I would love to see them!
Many thanks to Leisa, Patricia, and Leah for invaluable testing help.
Last year my local bakery closed when the owner retired after 40 years. His bread was amazing, and I always admired his sign, quietly inviting his customers to tell their friends.
I now own this sign, and would like to continue this initiative:
- If you like this feature, please tell your friends, either in person or by sharing this blog post, or posting screenshots
- If you don’t like it or if you have any trouble, please tell me
Thank you!
Contact info: @dnapainter.bsky.social / jonny@dnapainter.com