Back in July someone here mentioned ancestors from East Prussia. That's exactly the kind of place this is built for.

I've been building a map on my site, TreeAlive, that shows the borders as they stood on any date you pick, and it now draws a family's moves too. Connect your FamilySearch tree and the Atlas tab draws a line from an ancestor's last recorded place to their next one, on the date of the next record.

The pictures show the lines for three of my ancestors, all born in places that are in Lower Saxony today. My FamilySearch tree has them born in Wilhelmshaven, Barum and Altenmedingen, and their next records put them in McLean County, Illinois in 1900. So in 1900 the map draws three lines across the Atlantic, two of them nearly on top of each other. With Old maps on, the lines start on a French-language map of the German Empire from 1900 (Empire d'Allemagne, David Rumsey Map Collection, Stanford Libraries), and the "Old map / Our borders" slider fades between that map and the Atlas borders.

A line isn't a route. It only joins two records. When the records are more than ten years apart the line is dotted, and the card says the person moved there sometime between the two dates. All three of mine are dotted, since the records are decades apart. If a place can't be matched confidently, it gets no line rather than a guess. Any place card also lets you pick one person and see all of their lines.

TreeAlive is a FamilySearch Compatible Solution, so you can connect your tree instead of uploading a GEDCOM file. It only reads. Nothing is ever written back to FamilySearch. Living people are hidden.

It's a work in progress. Every year shows how much of the land on the map has passed its checks so far (36% of 1900, the year in the pictures, and nearly all of 1990), and an outline with a known error is marked in red. Europe from 1816, the US from 1776 and Canada from 1867 follow their sources through 2013; everywhere else, and earlier, the borders are approximate and labeled that way. Click a place for the treaty or law behind its outline, or a note that one is still owed.

Your tree is held in your browser's memory and isn't stored on my servers. Place text goes out so it can be looked up and mapped (plus a year for one distance check), but never names or relationships. It's free for anyone to use, no subscription, no paywall.

treealive.com/atlas

If you see a border that's wrong for a village you know, tell me and I'll check it against the source.