Birth and Death Bracket - thanks JPH!

Usually I only blog on Tuesdays and Sundays, but today I'm making a special exception.  Inspired by fellow genealogist, J Paul Hawthorne, I created an ancestral birth place "bracket." (I'm sure my dad, who was all about March madness, is smiling down from heaven right now.  Love you, Dad!)

JPH's concept was a graphical representation of birth places.  But for me that just wasn't enough.  I had so many migrants in my family, I also created a similar death location bracket.  But I still wasn't satisfied.  In order to "get it" you had to compare the two charts side by side.  In my mind, my ancestral theme is that of westward migration.

Finally, I came up with an idea to combine the two.  My ancestors start on the right and move forward in time to the left.  So the right half of their marker shows where they were born and the left shows where they died.  It is particularly striking to see a couple of sets of great-great grandparents born in Ireland and moving across an ocean and another continent all the way to California. (I know the text in the cells reads left to right but it looked to weird to me to list the death first and the the birth to get them to read right to left).

I've shown dark green for me, as I'm now in Washington, the Evergreen State.  I don't yet know if that's where I'll breath my last.  It's clear from this chart I've got a westward migration gene, and the Pacific Ocean sits just outside my door!

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