Same farm.
Eight counties.
Two states.
A family in the West Virginia hills could stay on one piece of land from 1768 to 1870 and leave records in eight different counties, one of which was abolished in 1776. Your genealogy software stores each of those places as a single line of text.
Placeline reads your tree and shows what every place was called on the date of each record, and where it is on today’s map.
Join the waitlist1774
Fincastle County, Virginia
What the records say
Six records for one sample family who never left their land. Select a row to see the county on the map.
| Year | Record | Place written on the record | Same place today |
|---|
The family is fictional. The places and dates of the boundary changes are real.
What Placeline does with your tree
Gives every place a history
For each event, Placeline works out the county, state and country as they were on that date, and the modern equivalent. You stop choosing between historical and modern names, because you keep both.
Cleans up your place list
It finds the twelve spellings of the same parish, merges duplicates, and writes the corrected places back into your file. You review every change before it is saved.
Maps your family through time
Drag through the years and watch who lived where, with the borders of that year drawn underneath. Neighbours, migrations and missing branches become easier to see.
Opens GEDCOM files from RootsMagic, Family Tree Maker, Legacy, Gramps, MacFamilyTree and Ancestry exports. Runs on your own computer. Your tree is never uploaded.
Where it works first
The first version covers every county boundary change in the United States since colonial times. German and Prussian places come next, including villages that were renamed after 1945. Tell us where your ancestors lived and we will use your answers to decide what follows.
Join the waitlist
We will email you once when early access opens. Three short questions help us build the right thing.