Bill Wood wrote: > Try this it is very very very good. I would say it was a good deal less good than that! > > Go to Scotlandsplaces yes thats right places not people. > > Use the search option to find a little known place in your tree. If you dig around at the site a little, you will discover the limitations of the Gazetteer they are using: "The gazetteer is a work in progress. At the launch of the site (in October 2009) it consisted mainly of entries on counties, cities, parishes, burghs, inhabited islands, and places with at least 100 inhabitants. Our intention is to continue to add to the gazetteer by improving entries or adding entries on more places, which exist now or existed at one time but have long since vanished." Brave aims. But I fear there is some little way to go. And there are alternatives available now, such as the Gazetteer which forms part of the GENUKI system. There are various routes in to this data from the individual County and Parish pages, or you can go straight to: http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/Gazetteer/ Aided and abetted by Ray Hennessy, I have been developing a historical Gazetteer of placenames in Banffshire, also using names from a variety of historical sources. But when I compare the "Scotlandsplaces" offering against our database for just a single small rural parish, I can quickly identify a dozen placenames for which Ray and I have chapter and verse, but which do not appear on Scotlandsplaces. > > Maybe they will have some photographs and maybe not. But the photographs are going to be of places which figure in the files of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historic Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS) - they are not often going to show the places where our ancestors were likely to have lived. > > Here comes the good bit > > Hit the button that says Plot Results on a Virtual Globe > > You will be prompted to download a .kml file > > Download the kml file somehwere sensible and double click on it - this will > fire up Google Earth > > Your location is now shown on google earth and you can add notes to the > location ie > > Granda Wilson built his whisky distillery here, wee McWillie Wilson born > here 1863. I have to say this part of what is offered strikes me as a bit creaky. If you try the GENUKI Gazetteer mentioned above, you find links that go straight (no downloading, no waiting for Google Earth) to pages which will show your chosen location on a range of different mapping services, and/or on a satellite image. > > Am still experimenting - you can put in hyperlinks and open up web pages but > I havent been able to put in a hyperlink that will open up files on my PC. > > And as a free bonus you get Lat and Long of your location for input to other > programs. So long as you know which flavour of Latitude and Longitude you are getting! The documentation for my GPS receiver lists over 100 different "Map Datums" which are used in different places to allow for the fact that the Earth is not a perfect sphere - and there are at least 3 different ways of calculating Lat/Longs which are valid (for varying purposes) in the UK. The differences between them in terms of postion on the ground is often as great as 100 metres, and translating between them involves some very hairy maths. * > I am quite excited about this as I have been severely dissappointed by > programs claiming to map family trees but failing abysmally > > ANybody know a similar location for English places try ? GENUKI (link above) covers UK & Ireland. This Gazzetteer is > good http://www.gazetteer.co.uk/index.htm - it wont give you a kml file but > it will help with obscure placenames I don't know how good it is for England, but it knows even less than "Scotlandsplaces" about NE Scotland. Gavin Bell * for chapter and verse, see: http://www.ordnancesurvey.co.uk/oswebsite/gps/docs/A_Guide_to_Coordinate_Systems_in_Great_Britain.pdf