With the advent of online maps, complete with satellite imagery and detailed directions, as well as GPS devices and apps to help us find just about any place with no problem, the benefit to genealogists is immeasurable. Not only can we quickly see where an old homestead, church or cemetery is on the map, but also how to get there and how long it will take, making planning research trips vastly easier.
However, say you’ve travelled to a large cemetery, maybe one with the markers flush to the ground, and finally managed to locate the stone you were looking for. You got some photos, transcribed, maybe took a rubbing, then paused for reflection and laid some flowers. Time for the trip home to save your data. It took a lot of time criss-crossing the field to find the stone, and you know that even though you know roughly where it is now, it’s still a wide, flat field from ground level. How to record the exact position?
Well, using an online map, you can try to get the closest latitude and longitude, and with a long enough string of numbers after the decimal point, you can get pretty close, but communicating a location with long numbers is pretty unwieldy. That’s where What3Words comes in.
W3W has marked off the entire planet surface into 3×3-meter square areas, and every single one is addressable by using only 3 words. In this case, I’ve located a specific grave marker in Google Maps.
I can get a pretty good location using the address, and more detail with Lat/Long, but copying and pasting or typing in the numbers to get navigation directions can be pretty annoying, and try reading them to someone over the phone. With W3W, the address of the same grave marker is “superb.hips.scored”. Easy to remember, easy to communicate.
For each location I find during my research, I include the Lat/Long, Google Maps URL and the What3Words URL in its wiki entry. I am in the process of updating the Google Earth KML file to make all of the places easily browsable directly in Google Earth and Maps.
The What3Words app and web page both provide navigation, and it’s so simple to record the place you want to record, reference and find later. You can even narrow down a building’s location to the front door, then locate your exact parking spot. This tool has been incredibly useful.