Turning a list of old family addresses into a map worth sharing

Turn census records, old letters, and family addresses into a map of your ancestors' lives — no GIS skills needed. Plans start at $19/month.

| October 21, 2026

Turning a list of old family addresses into a map worth sharing

You've been at this for years. Census records, old letters, church registers, city directories, immigration papers, deeds — every one of them holds an address, and every one of those addresses is a place where someone in your family actually lived, worked, or was baptized, married, or buried.

You've written those addresses down. Maybe you've got them in a spreadsheet already: "142 Elm Street, Cleveland, Ohio, 1911." "Rua das Flores 22, Lisbon, 1889." "Farm near Concession Road 4, Bruce County, Ontario, 1867."

What you don't have — yet — is a map. And a map is what turns a research project into something your cousins actually want to look at.

The problem: you have the addresses, but not the picture

This is the part that stalls most family history projects right at the finish line. You've done the hard work — the archive visits, the microfilm, the translation, the genealogy society memberships, the DNA matches cross-checked against paper trails. You have a list of forty, or two hundred, or eight hundred addresses spanning three countries and five generations.

But a spreadsheet of addresses doesn't tell a story. A map does. Seeing your great-grandmother's five addresses in the same neighborhood over twenty years tells you she never left the block. Seeing your great-uncle's addresses jump from rural Poland to a specific street in Chicago tells you exactly which chain migration path the family followed. That's the moment a relative leans in and says "wait, show me that again."

The trouble is that turning an address list into a map by hand is slow and error-prone. You could open a mapping tool and drop pins one at a time, but at fifty addresses that's an afternoon, and at five hundred it's a weekend you don't have. Old addresses also don't cooperate — street names have changed, cities have been renamed, county lines have moved, and a house number from 1890 might not exist as a location today at all. Pin-dropping by hand means you're also guessing, over and over, at exactly where an old address sits on a modern map.

Meanwhile, the actual cost isn't really money — it's momentum. Research that doesn't get turned into something shareable tends to sit in a folder. A map is what gets shared at the family reunion, printed for the reunion booklet, or posted in the family Facebook group where a distant cousin recognizes a name and messages you with three more records you didn't have.

The fix: treat it like a batch job, not a hundred small ones

The trick is to stop thinking of this as "look up address one, then look up address two." Instead, treat your whole address list as one job you run once a month (or once per research sprint), the same way a business runs its mailing list.

That's what a batch geocoding subscription is for. You upload your full spreadsheet of addresses — as many as you've collected — and you get back the same spreadsheet with latitude and longitude added for each row. From there, plotting them on a map is simple, because most mapping tools (including free ones) can turn a column of coordinates into pins instantly.

For a genealogy researcher, the volume is usually modest. A serious multi-generation project might have anywhere from a few dozen to a few thousand addresses across a lifetime of research. That's well within the smallest paid plan CSV2GEO offers: Lite, at $19 a month, covers up to 21,000 US addresses or 12,000 international addresses. Most family history projects — even ambitious ones spanning multiple countries — fit comfortably inside that, with plenty of room to add new records as you find them.

You're not locked in. It's a month-to-month subscription, so you can run it during an active research push, pause it when you're back to archive digging instead of mapping, and start it again when you're ready for the next batch.

How it works

Step 1: Gather your addresses into one spreadsheet

Pull every address you've collected into a single spreadsheet — one address per row. It doesn't need to be tidy. Historical spelling variations, abbreviated street types, missing house numbers — all of that is fine to include as-is. Add a column noting the person and year if you want to keep that context alongside the location later.

Step 2: Upload the file

Go to the CSV2GEO batch tool and upload your spreadsheet. There's nothing to install and nothing to configure — you're just handing over the file the same way you'd attach it to an email.

Step 3: Let it process

The service reads through every address and works out the best-matching location for each one, even when the address is old, incomplete, or uses a place name that's since changed. This runs in the background — you don't need to sit and watch it.

Step 4: Download your results

You get back the same spreadsheet, with columns added for latitude, longitude, and a note on how confidently each address was matched. Nothing is removed or reformatted — it's your original data, plus the location details.

Step 5: Bring it into a mapping tool

Take that finished spreadsheet into any simple mapping tool that accepts a spreadsheet of coordinates — many free options exist. Within minutes you'll have a visual map of every address, ready to zoom into, color-code by generation or family branch, or export as an image for a family history book or reunion handout.

What this actually gets you

The genealogy-specific payoff is bigger than it first sounds. Once you have coordinates instead of just text addresses, you can:

See migration patterns at a glance — which branch of the family moved west, which stayed put for a century, which crossed an ocean and then moved three more times.
Cross-reference addresses against historical maps or modern satellite views to see if a building still stands.
Spot clusters — extended family members who lived blocks apart without you realizing it until the pins line up.
Build a shareable, printable, or embeddable map for a family reunion booklet, a private family website, or a submission to a local historical society.
Catch mistakes in your own records — an address that geocodes to the wrong country or continent is often a sign of a transcription error worth double-checking.

None of that requires you to learn GIS software or hire anyone. It requires an address list and one upload.

FAQ

Is this hard to set up if I'm not techy at all? No. If you can attach a file to an email, you can use this. You upload a spreadsheet and download a spreadsheet. There's no software to install and no account setup beyond signing up for the plan.

What happens if an old address doesn't match anything on a modern map? Historical addresses are exactly the kind of messy data this is built to handle. Street names change, cities get renamed, and county boundaries shift — the service does its best to find the closest sensible match and tells you how confident it is in that match, so you can spot-check the uncertain ones yourself rather than trusting a wrong pin blindly. For addresses that are genuinely too vague to place — like "farm near the river" — you'll get a clear "no match" rather than a guess dressed up as a fact.

Do I need to know anything about mapping software to use the results? No. The file you get back is just your spreadsheet with two extra columns — latitude and longitude. Any basic mapping tool, including several free ones, can take that and plot pins automatically.

What if I only have twenty or thirty addresses — is a subscription overkill? You can start and stop the subscription as needed. Research tends to happen in bursts — you might do a heavy push over a few months, get a batch of new records geocoded, then pause the subscription until your next research trip turns up more addresses. It's month-to-month, so there's no penalty for using it for one busy month and then cancelling.

Will this cost more once my family tree grows? The Lite plan covers up to 21,000 US addresses or 12,000 international addresses a month, which is more than most personal genealogy projects will ever need in a single month. If a project genuinely grows past that — for a professional researcher building trees for multiple clients, for instance — there are larger plans, but most family historians never need to move up from the smallest tier.

Is my family's data private? Yes. You're uploading a spreadsheet to get coordinates back — the addresses aren't published, shared, or made searchable anywhere. It's treated the same way any private business data would be: processed to produce your results and nothing more.

Can I cancel anytime? Yes. It's a monthly subscription with no contract. Cancel whenever your research project is between active phases, and resubscribe when you're ready to process the next batch.

Turning research into something that gets shared

Genealogy research has a strange shape: enormous effort goes into collecting facts, and comparatively little goes into making those facts visible to the people who'd actually appreciate them. A map fixes that. It's the difference between telling your cousin "I found forty-three addresses for our great-great-grandparents" and showing her a map where she can see, at a glance, exactly how the family moved across three countries over eighty years.

You've already done the hard part. The mapping step is the easy one — one spreadsheet, one upload, one download, and a map worth sharing at the next family gathering.

--- *I.A. / CSV2GEO Creator*