About

TreeAlive is a free website that helps Virginians see their Revolutionary-era family history, not just read it. You give it your family tree, exported from any major genealogy service or connected directly from FamilySearch, and in about three minutes it returns a short animated film: every family line moving across historically accurate maps, generation by generation, with migration trails drawing westward as the decades pass.

For the 250th, a Time Machine feature overlays more than 100,000 georeferenced historical maps from collections like the Library of Congress and the David Rumsey Map Collection, so you can see an ancestor's land inside the Virginia of 1776 rather than the Virginia of today. A Historic Crossings feature surfaces the moments your family and a documented historical figure were in the same place at the same time, with sources attached, including George Washington's Virginia surveying years.

It is free, needs no account, and runs in any web browser. Available now through the anniversary. treealive.com