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.

The geographical pedigree chart

Voor de Nederlandse versie van dit blog svp hier klikken.
In March this year blogger J. Paul Hawthorne published a very colorful family tree pedigree chart showing only states of birth. It was an almost instant success. Eventually it went viral on Twitter and now the hashtag #MyColorfulAncestry is used by many. If not anything else the chart gives you a nice insight in family migration patterns. Almost immediately the plagiarist in me emerged :) Although Paul designed his spreadsheet for five generations, one can easily adapt it to six. I also put in birth places rather than states. In the Dutch genealogical context mentioning a state is not very significant. In the heading I mentioned what I call the generation length. My definition of that term is the period of time in years between the earliest known birth (or baptism) and the latest year of death within one generation. Now I am trying to figure out what to do with it...
A few days ago Dutch blogger Peter Fasol made a similar chart inducing Dutch bloggers to do the same. So below I am presenting my pedigree chart and the one of my wife.

Pedigree chart of 

Peter Miebies

Pedigree chart of

Adriana Orie

Who's next?

Pedigree chart/kwartierstaat

Voor een Nederlandse samenvatting, zie na de Engelse tekst.
This post is not meant to show you the details of where and when my ancestors have been born etc. The idea is that I show you the pedigree chart that my genealogy software is able to produce. I am  using a Dutch software package called GensDataPro. It has been developed by the Dutch Genealogical Society (NGV). Currently it is priced at € 70.00 for non members. It is not cheap but it is very flexible and the after sales service is fine.

7 generations 145 degrees print

The chart that you see here shows seven generations. It may be extended to maximum ten generations. But then the ninth and tenth generation are hardly legible if printed on letter or A4 format. Apart from color print black and white print in various qualities is possible as well. 
In the picture above the angle of the "bottom line" is 145 degrees but it can also be printed as full circle (0 degrees).

7 generations full circle print

It is also possible to show the pedigree chart (or any other genealogical printout) in rectangular frames. Below you see just a part of such a print, a decendants chart. Obviously printing a full chart on letter or A4 format will not result in a legible print. It is also possible to add thumbnails to each of the frames.

Decendants chart with thumbnails

I hope this post serves a useful purpose e.g. when making comparisons with other software. To avoid any misunderstanding I am in no way connected to the makers of GensDataPro nor am I a member of the NGV. The above is shown for information purposes only.

Samenvatting
Deze blogpost heeft niet tot doel om u de details van mijn kwartierstaat te tonen. De bedoeling is om te laten zien welke mogelijkheden het programma GensDataPro heeft om die kwartierstaat grafisch weer te geven. Het programma is ontwikkeld door de Nederlandse Genealogische Vereniging (NGV) en kost € 70,00 voor niet-leden en een tientje minder voor leden. Het is zeker niet het goedkoopste programma maar het werkt prima, heeft zeer veel mogelijkheden en er is een goede helpdesk.
Het eerste plaatje laat een cirkeldiagram zien met 7 generaties. Prints tot 10 generaties zijn mogelijk maar dat gaat wel ten koste van de leesbaarheid van generaties 9 en 10. Tenminste, wanneer er op A4-formaat wordt afgedrukt. Naast kleur zijn ook zwart/wit prints mogelijk.
Het afgebeelde diagram heeft een "onderlijn" met een hoek van 145 graden. Die hoek is instelbaar en kan ook op 0 graden gezet worden waardoor er een echt cirkeldiagram ontstaat. Zie het tweede plaatje. Nadeel daarvan is wel dat de namen deels op z'n kop staan.
Kwartierstaten, genealogieën en parentelen kunnen ook worden weergegeven zoals in het derde plaatje wordt getoond. Het zal duidelijk zijn dat een afdruk van b.v. een beetje kwartierstaat op A4-formaat, nauwelijks leesbaar is. Maar afdrukken op meerdere bladzijden is natuurlijk ook mogelijk. En dan is het wel leuk dat ook z.g. thumbnails kunnen worden toegevoegd. 
Hopelijk hebt u iets aan deze informatie, b.v. wanneer u vergelijkingen maakt met andere genealogische pakketten.
Voor de goede orde, ik heb geen enkele binding met GensDataPro noch ben ik lid van de NGV.