Your TNG site has taken an awesome leap forward in making surname research exciting.

The mapping feature that has been in previous versions of TNG was useful for showing locations on a map of where your ancestors were born, lived, married and died.  Having a geographical feel for ancestors’ movements and settlements is an important tool in working out migrations, for example.

How about a new way of seeing the concentration and the dispersing of your people, in a colourful way?

Enter Heat Maps.  In Version 11.0 we now have a thematic way to see global locations of surnames and places.  This feature is available now in the results pages for Places, Surnames and Search.  Note: results pages are shown in page viewing, not in editing mode.

So let’s have a look at my own Benedict family for locations.  Going into the Benedict TNG site, I select Places from the main menu.  This takes me to the Places List page, where I can see a horizontal bar chart showing the frequency (count) of places by country.  Interesting.  Note the new button in the Show localities area: Heat Map.

I am going to click on this button to see the whole world map next.  Or I could click on a country, then a region, then a city first.  The Heat Map button will work for that geographical zone.  Let’s explore the world.

Note the map pins as before.  Now you can also see coloured circles where you have nearby multiple places of interest to your family study.  I am going to zoom in closer to my North America family, using the zoom-in and zoom-out buttons located in the lower-right corner of the map.

Now we see many more locations of interest.  If you zoom down further, more places will appear, if you have them stored in your TNG Places category.  The numbers inside the circles is the count of places near that map location.

How about surnames?  Follow the same method of finding a heat map for the Surname category.  I am still following my Benedict line, so I went to the heat map for Benedict and zoomed down to Vancouver, British Columbia area.  See below.

Once you get zoomed in enough to have a single location for a surname, you will see the circles (B) change into map pins (C).  If you click on a circle (B), the map zooms down for a closer look.  If you click on a map pin, you get a popup box on that location and the individuals associated with that location (A).  Note that the location and the individual(s) have a link function, so if you click there, you will be taken to that specific place or individual review page.

Have fun exploring the world for your wandering relatives.