Miserable Outside, Marvellous Indoors

My Facebook status update at lunchtime today was "Miserable day in Sydney. Guess I'll just have to stay indoors and work on my genealogy." I have made progress on two fronts this afternoon. 


Firstly I installed a new plugin, Map Life Facts, to my Family Historian database.  "This Plugin uses Google Mapping Services and Google Geocoding Services to plot markers on web page maps. The Latitude & Longitude are plotted from Fact locations held in Place or Address fields within your GEDCOMdatabase." 

As I was unsure of what I was doing I backed up my database, chose a few preferences in the plugin and launched it. After around twenty minutes the plugin had finished doing its job and I was able to go through  the people in my database for whom it had created life event maps. It was able to produce maps for  6030 of the 8696 people in my database; those who missed out did not have places recorded or the tools were unable to locate the places named in my database. This process attached place co-ordinates  that could be exported in a gedcom file.

Having done this I saved a gedcom of my database and imported it into my TNG Family Website. Now many of the people, like Ernest Gillespie, in my database have a map that shows the location of events that happened during their life. The good news is that I didn't have to add the GPS co-ordinates for each place one at a time but that this snappy tool did it all for me. 

After accomplishing that new task and finding another reason to like Family Historian software I continued with some research. 

My focus at the moment is adding information and sources to the records I have rather than  adding new people to my database (but I can't help it if I find some). I noticed that several Ancestry trees have a wrong death date for Mr Geniaus' grandmother; I wrote to those people asking them to correct their data, I wonder if they will! I was pleased to see that these trees also had a death date and place (unsourced) for a person whose death I had not been able to find.  The place of death in Western Australia was the clue I needed to locate both a death and a funeral notice for this chap, George Benabo. From the information in the funeral notice I found that George was laid to rest in Karrakatta Cemetery in Perth. I also contacted the other people who have George in their tree to let them know that he died four years earlier than they had recorded.

My meandering created another mystery when I found a Zachariah Ball on the 1881 English Census living with Mr Geniaus' 2x Great-Uncle, Charles Ball. Zac was listed as Charles' Uncle which means that he would be Mr Geniaus' 3x Great-Uncle. My preliminary investigations could find no further evidence of Zac's existence. 

I'll have to wait for another miserable Sunday to track down Zac.