Place My Past

» see placemypast.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Genealogy software has exported the same file format since 1984. A GEDCOM is a flat text file listing people and the events attached to them, and every ancestry program on earth can write one. Place My Past was built on the observation that a GEDCOM is mostly place names nobody ever looks at, and that if you resolved them to coordinates you would get a map of where a family had physically been for two hundred years.

So you uploaded the file, and it plotted every event in your tree, and then it went further than plotting. It layered historical maps underneath, showed you the social history of the parish at the year in question, let you trace a migration as a line rather than a list of dates, and let other users annotate the places they shared with you. A free account could hold unlimited trees of up to five thousand individuals each. Forty-eight dollars a year opened the rest.

Resolving a place name to a point on the earth is the hard part of that idea, and Jonathan Whiting and Daniel Pollard did not solve it themselves. They used Freebase, the open structured database Metaweb had built and Google had bought, which held most of Wikipedia's facts in a form a program could query. It was free and it was enormous. In December 2014 Google announced it was being retired.

~ the case file ~

~ the notice ~

The announcement came on 13 March 2015 and explained itself plainly enough to quote. One of the main datasets that we use to find locations used in your family tree is called Freebase, it's a project run by Google that contains information from Wikipedia. Recently Google has announced that Freebase will be retired very soon. They added that there were other internal issues too, ones that would effect the usability of the site. That spelling is theirs.

Six days of warning, and then everything members had uploaded was deleted. The genealogy bloggers who carried the news spent most of their word count telling people to go and save their own data immediately, which is the correct advice and the reason the notice is preserved at all.

~ the dependency outlived it ~

Here is the part worth the grave. Freebase did not shut down on 19 March 2015. It went read-only on 31 March, twelve days after Place My Past had already closed, and the service itself kept answering queries until 2 May 2016. The thing that killed this site was still running fourteen months after the funeral.

That is what a retirement announcement does to anything built on top of it. Google published a date, a two-person team looked at the cost of migrating their whole geocoding layer to something else with no comparable coverage, and chose to stop rather than rebuild. The dataset was still there. The willingness to keep paying for a site that would need rewriting from the ground up was not.

~ what the archive got ~

The Wayback Machine holds the site working right up to the end. On 16 March 2015, between 01:16 and 01:22 UTC, somebody pulled seven copies of the homepage in six minutes, which is what a person archiving a site they are about to lose looks like. All seven show the navigation intact: Home, Map, Gallery, My family. No banner, no farewell, no shutdown page. Three days later it was gone.

There is no logo on any of them, because there never was one. The brand was a text link in a Bootstrap navbar reading Place My Past, which is why nothing visual survives of it anywhere.

~ wrong archives, wrong continent ~

A tool like this only works if your ancestors' paperwork was filed the way this tool expects. Parish registers and census returns, filed by a clerk who wrote the place name down in a language the geocoder has heard of. Turkish family history before the Republic lives in Ottoman archives that are not in Freebase and were not in anything Place My Past could query, and the people I know who have tried to trace a family back past the 1920s were dealing with handwriting and a script change rather than a file format. The map this thing drew was a map of where recordkeeping had been good.

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