There’s been a colorful chart (#mycolorfulancestry) making its way through the genealogy social media world over the past weeks, thanks to J. Paul Hawthorne’s creativity. It’s a fun, simple way to visualize the birthplaces of five generations of ancestors by color-coding.  Seeing my own has been fun, confirming that these folks truly did come from all over the place.

Yes, my nomads’ birthplace chart was indeed colorful, but I decided to try it with both birthplaces and death locations, and it changed dramatically! With births and deaths, thirty-one people covered six countries and thirteen states, and only seven of those thirty-one people ended their lives in the state or country where they were born. I was running low on colors, but it would be even more colorful if I had included all the places they lived in between. Maybe I’ll try that next…

You’ll find the template to try your own here.