Family

A family history map the rest of the family will actually read

Most of what a family knows about itself sits in three or four people's heads, and it goes when they do. A spreadsheet and a folder of scans won't get opened; a map will. Pin the harbour someone left from, the first house, the holiday everyone still argues about, and put the two paragraphs you know and whatever photographs turned up onto the pin itself. The link is private and needs no account, so you can send it to an eighty-year-old aunt and a teenage cousin and both of them will get in.

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Every map is a Max map until 31 October 2026

Every map you make is created at the Max tier automatically — no payment, nothing to claim.

What to put on a family history map

Where the family came from and where it went — the leaving, the first house, the days everyone still argues about. A record the next lot will read.

The place someone left from: The harbour, the station, the end of the road. It's the pin everything else on the map moves away from, and usually the one with the most story and the fewest photographs.
The first house: Not the grandest address the family ever had — the first one that was theirs. Two rooms and a range that never heated the place is exactly the detail worth writing down.
The Sunday nobody thought to record: Mass, then chips on the way home, the same walk every week for a decade. Nobody photographs a routine, which is why it only survives if someone pins it.
The day that turned into a story: The ruined picnic, the missed ferry, the argument nobody will drop. Pin it and let the versions disagree — the disagreeing is half of what's being handed on.
The time everyone was in one place: A wedding, a rented house, one weekend a year in the same park. Some of the people in those photographs are gone now, which is the whole argument for doing this.
Where everyone is now: One pin per branch, on the town they ended up in — three counties over or three time zones. It turns a map of the past into one the living relatives find themselves on.

See one you can actually open

An example map, made from one family's seventy years in Ireland — ten memories from the goodbye at Cobh harbour in 1952 to the grandchildren still gathering at Howth. Tap a pin to open the memory behind it; pins that sit close together group into numbered pins until you zoom in.

Send it round and let them disagree.

Relatives who'd never sit down with a family tree will open a map — and every one of them remembers something you don't, or remembers it differently.

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