A couple of years ago, I was driving through a village I'd passed a hundred times. It wasn't until I got home and happened to be browsing my tree that I realised my great-great-grandmother was baptised in the church there. I'd driven past it without a thought.

I've thought a lot since then about how we might use today's technology to get physically closer to the events which up till now were simply written records. Now I'm ready to begin sharing the first steps to walking where our ancestors walked.

Heritage Compass

TNG has been central to how I manage my family history. It's given me a powerful, structured way to explore my tree — to see the connections, follow the lines, understand the bigger picture. But it's always been a view from the outside looking in.

I wanted to stand where my ancestors stood. To drive through the parishes they were baptised in, past the fields they farmed, through the towns they left. TNG holds all of that information — Heritage Compass takes it off the screen and puts it on the ground beneath your feet.

If you can export a GEDCOM from TNG, you can be up and running in under two minutes. No reformatting, no technical knowledge, no account required.
As family historians, we spend countless hours researching where our ancestors lived, but we rarely get to experience those places in a meaningful way. I wanted to create something that bridges the gap between digital research and physical exploration.

When you're traveling, visiting relatives, or even just going about daily life, Heritage Compass can reveal hidden connections to your past. That church you drive past on you way to work? Your gg grandmother was baptised there. On your way to a holiday location, you pass a town where three generations of your family lived and worked.

With the app running quietly in the background, it already knows every place your ancestors touched — every birth, marriage, burial, migration recorded in your tree. As you move through the world, it's watching. When you approach one of those places, it wakes up. On your Apple Watch, a gentle tap. Through CarPlay, a calm voice tells you who was here, what happened, and offers to guide you there. You don't need to remember. The app remembers for you.

What it does

Heritage Compass connects your GEDCOM file to the physical world. Import your tree — from TNG, or any other major genealogy platform — and the app maps every recorded location your ancestors touched: births, marriages, burials, and all the events that marked their lives.

From that point on, it works quietly in the background. Using iOS geofencing, it monitors up to 20 of your closest ancestral locations at any given time, updating dynamically as you move. When you approach a place your ancestor knew, the app responds.

On Apple Watch, a gentle tap on the wrist. Through CarPlay, a calm spoken narrative as you drive through ancestral country. No need to open the app. No screen required.

Tap any location on the Heritage Map and you'll see every connection your family tree holds for that place — the depth of what you find is a direct reflection of your own research.

Worth knowing

- Monitors the 20 closest ancestral locations at all times, always updating as you travel
- Apple Watch notification as you get close
- CarPlay spoken narrative — completely hands-free
- Privacy-first — your location data never leaves your device
- No account, no subscription required

     

Beta testing — iOS

Heritage Compass is currently in active beta on iOS, and I'd love to have some experienced genealogists in the mix. People who have deep, well-researched trees will get the most from it — and your feedback at this stage genuinely shapes how the app develops.

To join the beta:

1. Install **TestFlight** from the App Store (it's Apple's free beta testing platform — straightforward to set up)
2. Open this link on your iPhone: testflight.apple.com/join/Z2tfxhMC
3. Follow the prompts to install Heritage Compass
4. Import your GEDCOM and take it for a walk

Android is following shortly. If you'd like to be notified when that version is ready, feel free to drop a reply here.

Feedback — positive or critical — is very welcome. This is exactly the stage where it matters most.

Happy to answer any questions below.

Martin & Rick

martin@siorailabs.com
rick@siorailabs.com

Has anyone done this before ?

THX

So, I guess the question is what do I do now, as far as TNG is concerned?  Do I detach myself from that family and create a new one with just my mother and myself?  The biological father is still unknown at this time, but all evidence points to the fact that Forrest Jones Sr is NOT my biological father.

Any suggestions for sorting this will be appreciated,

Is there a way in TNG to have a report generated showing the descendancy for each individual from the commpn ancestor ?? Right now the relationship calculator says they are spouses..THX!

Allen
https://pagesfromourpast.com

I'll hold off on ("off on", I love that) posting my thoughts to give the people who have posted email messages to the discussion a chance to repost those messages here. Then I'll either followup on those or modify this message

- Robin

Danita

I just watched this episode and highly recommend it.

General question regarding a couple that married-divorced-married each other again.

How do you handled that in your tree software.

I am using family tree builder from My Hertiage and it will not let me do it, states already married to each other.

Thanks in advance

Dean

'...if you were of military age as a young person, a young man, from Ireland getting off the boat in America, you were immediately put into the Union Army if you're - if you landed in a Union port, and vice versa in a Confederate. This was to earn your citizenship. I mean, this was something I simply didn't know. So a person who has lost everything behind him - his future, the people who loved him, the people he loved, his whole possibility of meeting some girl someday in a, you know, a hawthorn-strewn country road and marrying her and having his babies, and all the rest of it, gone for all eternity - is then put straight into a uniform, given a musket and told to go and fight for something he didn't understand. Was he even speaking English?...'

short question:

I recieved a lot of historic documents from my family members. My Great Aunt is reading some of them for me since, they are in old writing I can barely read. Therefore my question, how would you store the translated text?

Simply in a txt-file with the same name as the scans, or is there any special software?

thanks!

Does TNG have anything like this?

Anyone doing anything better/different?

When a man has a son and gives him the same name as himself, the child usually has the suffix "Jr" tacked on to his name. This is part of his legal name - it's on the birth certificate. No problem there.

At the same time, the father typically starts having the suffix "Sr" added to his name. But this is seldom (very rarely?) (never?) an actual legal name change.

How to any of you handle it?

Do you add the "Sr" to their name even though it isn't quite correct?

Do you not add anything and just list them by their birth name?

Personally, I've been just leaving off the "Sr" designation.

I'm looking to sign up to a Genealogy site, but don't know which one is going to give me the most for my money!  The three 'contenders' here in the UK as far as I can see, are:

Ancestry.co.uk - £119.99 for 12 months access to all UK records  [http://www.ancestry.co.uk/cs/offers/subscribe?sub=1]

Find My Past - £129.50 for 12 months access to all UK records [https://www.findmypast.co.uk/pay?isfreetrialrequest=false]

The Genealogist - £119.45 for their Diamond package, access to all UK records [http://www.thegenealogist.co.uk/compare/]

Which one do I go for? Especially when they are all around the same price? 

QromaScan

An application for this new technology immediately comes to mind: the easy collection of photos from attendees at family reunions!

Recently I've had the good fortune to see a brick wall come crashing down and now I find myself concerned with many more such dates!

How does one enter them and make them clear?

Say a date of 18 Feb 1630 Julian calendar = 18 Feb 1631 Gregorian calendar ... what date gets entered?

Or is there even more to it that I haven't caught on to?

A highly informative scholarly discussion of the history of the region and peoples.