I have this thought, and it was brought to mind again by an article on Wired which linked to this artists (Jason Salavon) work with the US census data. Basically, he took the US census data over 200 years and created an image with a ribbon of color representing each county.

My idea is similar, kind of. While thinking about projects to do for my history and maps class this semester, and while talking with a colleague, I wondered how one could graphically represent ones genealogy. Most of us in the United States have ancestors that came from somewhere else. Many of us have ancestors that came from multiple somewhere elses. Looking at my ancestry alone I claim Arizona, Colorado, Utah, England, Sweeden, Germany and I’m sure several other places I don’t yet know of. One thought as to how to do this would be with a world map and lines and dots representing locations and familial connections. The lines and dots would be in gradients of color, each color representing a date. I tried doing a mock up in Photoshop quickly, but it wasn’t working right. I’ll have to do it in Flash, since that behaves like I expect. Flash might be a better platform anyways, because the map is then dynamic and can be dragged, zoomed, and dots and lines can be given data associated with them.

When I was in high school, my friends and I would go down to the Salt River, tie one end of a ski rope to a tree, and the other end to our home made river boards. These were generally three foot diameter circular pieces of plywood, carefully and lovingly designed, painted and created by me and my friends. We’d throw the board into the middle of the river (this used in the broadest sense of the term, since Arizona isn’t too well known for flowing bodies of water), jump on and ride the current. We’d jump the board and do tricks like head stands, hand stands, back flips, etc. It was the source of very fond memories.

Well, imagine my surprise, when looking up some information about Wernher von Braun for a school paper today, and here he is, “water-boarding” in the middle of the Tennessee River! Wernher von Braun, enigmatic rocket man! Creator of the U.S. missile and space program! Rocket genius! and River Boarder! Awesome!

Stuhlinger, Ernst. Wernher Von Braun, Crusader for Space: An Illustrated Memoir. Malabar, Fla: Krieger Pub. Co, 1994, page 39.