Roots & Routes
Explore the family tree ten ways: by generation, place, era and relationship. Click anyone and every view follows.
Roots & Routes
Ancestors one way, descendants the other, the focus person in the middle. Switch to mini cards to fit more generations, or flip it upright. Each card carries the flag that flew over the birthplace in the birth year.
Ancestors as rings, father's side on the left, mother's on the right. One glance shows how complete the research is: dashed gaps are the parents still to find.
Where the family moved, drawn on the Atlas outlines. Drag the year and watch the arcs appear: each arc is one person (or one family) leaving a place. Underneath, the Atlas says whose rule each place was under and what else was happening there.
Time runs across, places run down. Each bar is a life, coloured by family line. Curves show people moving between lanes. Tinted bands are the Atlas regime over that place, hatched bands are Atlas events such as famine or epidemic.
Every place this tree can put a person in. Click a marker to pick a place, or find it in the list. Bigger markers hold more people, and the colour is the Atlas regime that ruled the place. Markers are places, not kinship.
The family and the world it was in. Bands are the Atlas regimes over each region the family touched, with their flags. Family events sit above the bands, what they were up against below, and the story line underneath puts both on one scale.
The surnames of the focus person and every ancestor, as a cloud. Bigger = more people carried the name. Click a name to see who they were, and click anyone to re-centre the whole page on them.
Pick a second person and see exactly how they are related: the nearest shared ancestors, each generation down both sides, and where every link on the chain was born. Falls back to a marriage path when there is no shared ancestor.
Lifespans of the focus person's relatives, oldest at the top, with Atlas events behind them. Slide across to see who was alive in any year.
The focus person's whole line as light. Each person hangs from a glowing head on a rail; births bud off a parent, deaths rise into the sky and stay as stars. The ground below the rail is the Atlas regime over the place that year, and Atlas events arrive from above. Press play, or drag the year.
The same line painted onto a ledger, time running down the page. Each person is a brush stroke from birth to death; the dot is the present. A recorded death ends in a bar, an estimated one fades. Washes are the Atlas regimes, the right-hand stripe is Atlas events. Stop it and you have a poster.
One life at the centre. The focus person is the middle line; parents to the left, spouses and children to the right. The pale ribbon is the width of the household, so it fills as children arrive and narrows as they go. Captions are pinned to their years and slide past.
The same people as generations: one row each, oldest at the top, the focus person ringed. The tree grows as you play it. The strip below counts the depth.
Where this family lived, on the Atlas coastlines. A dot is a place, sized by how many of them were living there that year and coloured by the regime that ruled it, as on the Atlas map. A line joins the places where someone's record changes place. The travelling dot only marks the window in which the move must have happened. A dashed line with no dot is a stop whose year is not recorded: the order is the roster's, the timing is not known.
Which one to use
No single view does everything. They answer different questions, so the strongest site uses a few, each for one job.
| View | Answers | Scales to | Phone | Weakness |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hourglass | Who are this person's parents and children? | Any size, ~30 people at once; mini cards roughly double that | Good, upright mode helps | No sense of the whole tree |
| Fan | How complete is this person's ancestry? | Ancestors only, 4 to 6 generations | Fair | No descendants or siblings |
| Whole-tree map | What is in this file, and where is everyone? | Thousands of people | Fair | Names only when zoomed |
| Movements | Where did they go, and when? | Hundreds of moves | Good | Only people with two known places |
| Place lanes | Who lived where, under whose rule, and who moved? | Around 100 people per screen | Scrolls sideways | Needs places on most people |
| Lifespans | Who overlapped? Do the dates make sense? | Around 50 relatives | Good | Shows time, not family shape |
| Atlas map | Where is everyone, and who is at this place? | Thousands of people, hundreds of places | Fair | Needs a coordinate per place |
| Eras | What was happening around them, in one picture? | A few regions at a time | Scrolls sideways | Depends on Atlas region coverage |
| Kinship | How exactly are these two people related? | Any two people with a shared ancestor | Good | Needs a shared ancestor or a marriage link |
| Orphans | What is not joined up, and where should I look? | Any size | Good | Only as good as the Atlas collections |
Default navigator: Hourglass
On every person page, with the person card beside it. Simple, never dead-ends, and the mini and upright modes cover phones and big families.
Front door: Whole-tree map
The landing page for a large GEDCOM. Shows the shape of the family and gets a visitor to a person in two clicks.
The signature: Place lanes
Nobody else has Atlas regimes behind a family timeline. This is the view that shows what is distinct about your sites, so put it on every line page.
Story mode: Movements
Use it as the animated opener for a family line, and for sharing. Fan stays as the print and poster view.
How it ties into the Atlas
Birth and death places carry an Atlas pin map and a link to that place's Atlas page: the archives, the volumes, and the other names it has had.
The same place shows a different colour for a baptism in 1884 and one in 1930. This is the Atlas's own rule: it tells the visitor which archive to open.
Places the Atlas has no region for show a grey pin and an "add it" link. In this sample that is Mljet, Kraków, Warsaw, Stellenbosch and Perth.
The famine, epidemic and war bands use the Atlas mortality list, matched to each place by its outline. Nothing on this page is written by hand.
For the real build: convert the GEDCOM once into a small JSON file, geocode each place name against the Atlas gazetteer (this is where its alternate names help), and draw everything in plain SVG. The map outlines and regime tables are already Atlas data, about 220 KB for what you see here. Withhold living people in the JSON itself; this mockup only hides their names. Movements need two places per person or a parent's place to compare, so an import report of "people with no place" is worth showing the researcher.