Solving Family Tree Mysteries with Google Earth by Lisa Louise Cooke

I have the most comfortable seat in the back of the room for Lisa's debut of her new workshop. I am excited to finally see her in action since I had to leave the banquet early last night.

I am also happy to learn that this is free application since I spent my mad money on t-shirts and stamps at the Family History Expo booth.

Lisa just showed us how easy it is to navigate through the Search Panel, Places Panel, and Layers Panel (where tools are buried in tools). Lisa just took us to Disneyland!

You can collect geographic points of interest around the world. Lisa walked us through the toolbars and panels with helpful tips and insights to make it easy for us to use.

You can do a family history tour on Google Earth by plotting migration patterns. Take one ancestor with key events and locations such as Birth, Christening, Graduation, Marriage, Birth of Children, Death, etc. Through Google you can find the location of the event, name the placemaker in the pop up window, and you have tracked migration patterns. Lisa makes it just that easy!

You can create video! You can also explore your ancestors lives with historic maps. Addresses on census lists offer you a goldmine of information. Here are some other sites she uses to enhance the tracking ancestors.

• Search Rumsey Historical Maps which date back to 1680. http://www.davidrumsey.com/. These maps will work with Google and provide an overlay.
• Search the original lands records at www.glorecards.htm.gov/Patentsearch
• Check out www.earthpoint.us/townships.aspx

When I think I have learned so much from this one session, Lisa says we can use this to solve photographic mysteries. If you have some basic information, you can start to deduce potential locations through business backgrounds, people in photo, stories you have heard. Between searches in the city directory and voter registrations, a number of addresses can be deduced as possibilities. Check out more of Lisa's great information at http://www.genealogygemstv.com/. This is truly taking us to Genealogy Utopia!