Make a family migration map

A family migration map shows where your family came from and where it went: a dot for every place someone was born, lived, married, died or was buried, and a line for each move between them. Draw My Tree draws it from the places already in your tree or your GEDCOM file, so you never type a coordinate, and prints it as a "Where we came from" poster.

Try it as a guest with a few names or a GEDCOM file. No account is needed for up to 50 people.

Step 1: get your places in

The map reads the places you already have: each person's birth, baptism, death and burial places, and the places on their events (residences, censuses, immigration, marriages, occupations, property and church records). Type them into a person's details (Building your tree), or import a GEDCOM exported from Ancestry, FamilySearch, MyHeritage, Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic or any other genealogy program (Import a GEDCOM).

Write places the way genealogy programs do, from the town out to the country: "Boston, Suffolk, Massachusetts, USA", "Cork, Ireland", "Naples, Italy". Everyday spellings work: "USA" or "United States", a US state's postal code ("Providence, RI"), "St." for Saint, and English or older names for many countries.

Step 2: switch to the map

Open Look on the rail.
Under Chart, choose Map.

Or open Insights from the ⋮ menu beside the tree's name (More on a phone) and select Open map on the Places card: the map opens on that person's family.

If no one shown has a place yet, the map says so, and Add a place for the person it counts from opens their details.

The map is fitted to your family's places. Drag to move it and scroll or pinch to zoom; Fit the whole tree brings it back.

How the map is drawn

Dots are places. A bigger dot holds more people, on a scale that keeps a city where dozens were born from hiding everything else. A hollow dot is a place the map found only as its county, state or country (usually a town too small for the place list), and its name says "near", as in "near Hamilton County, Ohio".
Lines are moves, with an arrowhead at the end where the person arrived. When your tree records where people lived or died, each line follows one person from one of their places to the next, in the order of their records. When it records little more than birthplaces, each line runs from where a parent was born to where their child was. The first line of the map's Key says which you are looking at.
Places close together, such as a city and its neighboring towns, are drawn as one ringed dot named after the largest ("Boston area"), and a box in the bottom corner spreads them out with the moves between them.
Colors follow the generations, from the oldest to the youngest, and the key names each one by the years its children were born ("Children born 1899–1907"). Each generation's lines also have their own dash, so they read apart without the color. Under Key, Color by switches to Family lines: each line takes the color of the grandparent's side of the family it belongs to, the same colors as family colors on the tree.

The map shows modern borders. A place written with an older name, such as Prussia or Bohemia, is placed in the country it is in today.

Step 3: see who was where

Select a dot, or move to it with the arrow keys and press Enter, to see who was there and why: born, lived, married, died or buried, with their years. Select a name to open that person's details. A ringed dot lists every place it holds.

List of places, at the top of the map, opens a list beside the map that says the same in words. It has up to three tabs:

Places names every place once, however your tree writes it, with how many people it holds and their years. Type in Find a place or person to narrow it, and choose Sort places to list them A to Z, by Most people or Earliest first. Select a place to open its row: how it was found, who was there, and the lines that start or end there, each with the line the map draws it in. Select another place in a line to go to it. The place you open is ringed on the map, and selecting a dot opens its row.
Moves lists every move with the line the map draws it in, named as the key names it, and who made it.
Needs a look appears when any place wasn't found or was only placed near, and lists those places with what is wrong with each.

The key sits at the foot of the list while it's open. Select Hide the list to give the map the whole screen; the map remembers your choice on this device.

On a phone, the map and list buttons at the top switch between the two. Select the pin beside a place in the list to see it on the map. Selecting a dot opens a card for that place at the foot of the map, with buttons to the places before and after it, A to Z.

Step 4: play the years

The Year slider under the map shows your family as it stood in a year, from the earliest dated place to today. On a wider screen, ticks under it mark the decades. Places nobody had reached by then are drawn pale, a move's line appears in the year it happened, and the count beside the slider says how far along you are: "Up to 1934 · 5 of 10 moves".

When the map has little room, such as on a phone with a panel open over it, the slider shows just the year and the key steps aside. Close the panel to bring the key back; the list of places names every line meanwhile.

Select Play to watch the years go by, about a decade a second, and Pause to stop. Play starts again from the beginning once the slider is at today.
With the slider selected, the left and right arrow keys move a year, Page Up and Page Down a decade, and Home and End jump to the first year and today.
A move appears in the year a child was born at the end of the line, or the year the person moved when your tree records where they lived. A place or move with no date appears only at today.
If your device is set to reduce motion, Play steps a decade at a time and the places and lines fade in.

The slider is part of what you see, not of the look: it starts at today each time you open the map, and a print always shows every move.

Step 5: check the places

The foot of the Key says how many of your places were found. When some weren't, a button beside List of places says how many ("3 of 26 places not found"); select it to open the list on Needs a look:

Not found: nothing matched. The place is listed but not drawn. Check the spelling, and add the town's county, state or country if it has none ("Laeken" alone could be anywhere; "Laeken, Brussels, Belgium" is found).
Near: placed on its county, state or country.
Guessed: more than one place has that name, and the map chose the one nearest your other places.

Places with map coordinates in your GEDCOM file are placed exactly where the file says.

Put a place where it belongs

If you own the tree or can edit it, the buttons at the foot of an open place fix a place the map has wrong:

Place the pin on a place that wasn't found or is only near. Type another way of writing it under Find the place and select Find, or enter its latitude and longitude, then select Save the pin.
Move the pin on a place the map put in the wrong spot.
Leave as near keeps a near place as it is and takes it off Needs a look, on this device.

A pin is saved for the place, not the person, so everyone recorded there moves with it, and the map redraws as soon as it's saved. A GEDCOM export carries it as the place's map coordinates. Remove the pin in the same box goes back to finding the place by name. People you've shared the tree with to view see the pins but can't change them.

Step 6: choose whose family it is and who is on it

The top of the map says who the generations count from: Generations from "Robert Whitfield". It starts on the person the tree opens on, unless they have no parents in the tree. Choose someone else there and the generations and their colors count from them instead; everyone shown stays on the map, which is the whole family.

The map shows the same people as the tree, so the Filter panel narrows it the same way:

Focus on one person's ancestors or descendants, and the map becomes that person's family: the top reads Map of "Robert Whitfield's family", and the poster names them. With a focus on, choosing someone under Map of moves the focus to them. Open map in Insights opens it this way, on the person's direct line, the family its Places card counts.
Family name to map one surname.
Hide living people before you share or print it.

Step 7: print "Where we came from"

Open Export on the rail and choose A print, or Make a print in the toolbar, with the map on screen. The print has the title "Where we came from", a line naming whose family it is (or the whole family, without a focus), how many generations and how many people, the map, its key and the place credit. Print your family tree covers every size and option.

On a free account the print steps show the map as it would print and download a watermarked picture of it at screen size. Printing the map at paper and poster sizes, as a print-ready PDF or SVG, comes with a one-time Keepsake for that tree, or with the Family Plan for every tree. Prices are on the pricing page.

Frequently asked questions

Is my family's information sent anywhere to find the places? No. The places are looked up in your browser, against a place list the app downloads from Draw My Tree, one country at a time. No place name leaves your browser.

Where do the places come from? Towns come from GeoNames, which lists every town of about 1,000 people or more, and the map's coastlines and borders from Natural Earth. The map's corner says so: "Places: GeoNames, CC BY 4.0 · Map: Natural Earth".

Why is a small town drawn hollow? The place list only has towns of about 1,000 people or more, so a smaller one is placed on its county instead, and drawn hollow so it never looks exact.

Does a shared link show the map? Yes, when the look you share is a map. People shown as "Private" on the link have no places on it, no lines to or from them, and are not counted at any dot.

Can I change the colors? Yes. The map takes its colors and typeface from the look. In Look, Chart colors sets the Line color, which tints the land and the borders, and the Label color for the place names and the dots.

What to read next

Last updated October 24, 2026 by Prescott Bros LLC, the makers of Draw My Tree.