Website Development - Chicago Ancestors - Online Historical Resource Mapping

ChicagoAncestors.org is an online map allowing users to find and share historical Chicago resources in their own neighborhood or their own family history.  Built for and maintained by The Newberry, a renowned independent research library in Chicago, the ChicagoAncestors site provides a foundation for historians, genealogists, and the curious browser.  Data available on the site includes historical collections from The Newberry, the Chicago Historical Society, hundreds of photographs, numerous academic sources, and even the city's 20th-century homicide records.

Originally built in 2006, the site was showing its age when The Newberry contracted The Galecia Group to rebuild it in 2015.  Working carefully to preserve the thousands of stored data records, Galecia consultants migrated the site to a new Drupal platform and overhauled the geographical search and visualization features.  New features include an automatic neighborhood-identifier tool for new data records.  In addition, a new custom map layer was built using completely custom-designed tiles.