Mapping the Lives

For more than half a century, the memorial documentation for victims of nazi persecution in Europe have been kept in books, in libraries, in the cities and towns where the victims lived. The memorials are mostly available only by traveling to that place, and in many instances requires an appointment to view the archives.

Mapping the Lives is a project of Tracing the Past e.V., a non-profit organization that is creating a unified online memorial for all victims of nazi persecution in Europe from 1933 to 1945, in order to make this information available to the public as it was intended to be. This online database allows a place for teaching and learning about WW2, for provenance research, and for helping families of victims access their memorials.

Our contribution

We rebuilt their database which was previously struggling to present 200,000 memorial pages online, making it capable of holding more data points per memorial page, and sharing their current total database of nearly 1 million memorials. The new search interface we created makes it possible to navigate the map to find locations, individuals and more with ease. Currently, you can see the recorded census information, memorial book entry, the timeline of the individual’s movement during the war, including deportations, imprisonments, immigrations, emigrations and more. We included the ability for other organisations to use the database to share subsets of the data for presentation in local contexts, museum exhibits and for creating educational materials.

Our continued work with Tracing the Past e.V. covers expanding the available memorials as memorial books are digitized and added to the database. We are also implementing new features including adding visual media, long form biographies and personal histories, and much more.

We encourage you to explore Mapping the Lives for yourself, and to support this project if you can.

or explore the embedded map below.