How far did my ancestors move?

Under this title Yvette Hoitink published a post in her blog wondering a.o. why her ancestors moved between birth and death. Or why they did not. To visualize the distances her ancestors covered, she designed a chart. It covers six generations and shows the distance in kilometers between the place of birth and the place where an individual died. Although Yvette does not mention how she measured these distances, I took the distance as the crow flies. Google has a simple tool to do this*. So my chart looks as follows:

My pedigree chart showing distance between place of birth and place of death in kilometers

Without going in too much detail, the following may be worth noting.

• Out of the 63 persons shown in the chart 21 did not move at all (or returned to their place of birth), 14 men and 7 women. Five couples remained in their place of birth.
• 18 persons moved but remained in the region where they were born. They moved 22 kilometers or less. Only 5 out of these 18 were men.
• 8 persons moved more than 100 kilometers, 5 men and 3 women. Three men were in the military. The man covering the longest distance was a soldier who died in the Dutch East Indies back in 1834.
• Not considering the soldiers on average men moved 50 kilometers, women a little less: 46 kilometers.
• Due to a lack of geographical information the distance for 7 people could not be calculated (yet).
• The impression is that if men moved this was mainly for economical reasons.
• For whatever it is worth the average distance over which people moved is 35 kilometers. This figure does not include the soldier who died in the Far East. When including this person the average comes to 246 kilometers. In Yvette's chart the overall figure is 17 kilometers. That is because 31 people did not move at all (vs 21 in my chart).

I thank Yvette for coming up with this idea. Hopefully many people will make a similar chart!

* Go to Google Maps, click on the place of birth, right click on your mouse, select <measure distance> and click on the place where that person died.

Update August 27, 2017
The chart shown above is based on my pedigree chart. The one below shows the apparently more travel happy ancestors of my wife.

My wife's pedigree chart showing distance between place of birth and place of death in kilometers

For this chart I made similar observations

• Out of the 63 persons shown in the chart 13 did not move at all (or returned to their place of birth), 6 men and 7 women. Just one couple remained in their place of birth.
• 12 persons moved but remained in the region where they were born. They moved 22 kilometers or less. 7 out of these 12 were men.
• 9 persons moved more than 100 kilometers, 4 men and 5 women. As far as I know none were in the military. 
• On average men moved 38 kilometers, women marginally more: 39 kilometers.
• Due to a lack of geographical information the distance for 6 people could not be calculated (yet).
• The  impression is that here more couples started travelling after their marriage: 10 couples versus just 6 for my ancestors.
• For whatever it is worth the average distance over which people moved is 43 kilometers. In Yvette's chart the overall figure is 17 kilometers. That is because 31 people did not move at all (vs only 13 in this chart). 

Update September 5, 2017
Looking at the two charts I believe the first one (mine) is very much of what is to be expected. The majority of movements can be considered as local movements. Out of the 63 persons 39 remained in (or returned to) their place or region of birth. It is safe to say that the majority saw no (economical) need to move a greater distance than 22 kilometers. The situation in the second is somewhat different. As is demonstrated by the dark brown sections on the right, my mother-in-laws' family covered the longest distances. They all came from the northern part of the country (Groningen) where the unemployment level in those days was relatively high. For the larger part they moved to the west i.c. to IJmuiden and The Hague. The remainder of the chart resembles my chart: local movements galore!

By the way, I wonder how the chart of someone living in the States, Canada, Australia etc. would compare to ours. I suspect that charts displaying mainly small countries such as The Netherlands, will look quite different.