Neat Feature on Google Maps

I have no idea how long this feature on Google Maps has been around, but I’m sure glad I found it…

Back story:  A month or so ago, I wanted to see where my maternal and paternal grandparents lived in relation to one another.  I looked at Google Maps and Yahoo! Maps for something that would allow me to tag several locations, but came up empty.  Being the impatient person that I am, I gave up.  But then…

A few days ago, I was faced with a similar dilemma, trying to map out a cemetery adventure for my upcoming weekend get-away to Chicago.  Back to Google Maps I went, in search of the same functionality I looked for before.  After getting frustrated once again, I saw it:  My Maps…

Just a text link, below the search box, practically hidden, it called to me.  So I clicked it.  At first I didn’t know what to do.  I clicked on the “Create new map” link and was prompted for a title, description, and privacy setting.  I went ahead and put in a title and selected “unlisted” as my privacy setting (hey, I didn’t know what I was getting myself into).  Still not knowing what I was doing, I saved it and that seemed to be it.  Great I saved a map of the U.S., now what?  And then I saw it…

Handy dandy tools, of particular interest was a “pin.”  So I clicked on it and dropped it on the map, and viola!  Up popped a dialog box asking for the title and description.  I filled them in, clicked on the pin tool again, dropped it on the map, and…

I basically went pin-happy.  I kept going, thinking this was the coolest thing since sliced bread.  I kept plotting away and on the left side of the screen, it kept a tally of all my pins with their titles and descriptions.  You can even change the pin color and/or style, which comes in handy for categorizing or grouping.

I’ve plotted my cemetery adventure using this tool.  For the title, I use the name of the cemetery.  In the description, I include the address and a list of people I’m searching for.  When I print out the map, it includes all of the information after the map, similar in the layout used for driving directions.  Below are samples:  map view, side-panel view, and print view.

Next on the list…plotting my grandparents as I mentioned earlier.  I’m so very excited!

There appears to be many other things you can do, but for my purposes, this was enough for me.  Besides, I was already on pin-overload…I couldn’t take much more excitement!