Maptopus — Maps across time

Why

It began with a straight line I couldn't draw.

Draft — I'll revise this

I was tracing my grandfather Michał's route through the forests of the Wilno region, where he served in the 5th Brigade of the Home Army — the AK. The maps I had, Apple's and Google's, failed me twice. First they couldn't find the places at all: I typed the Polish names from Michał's own notes, but those towns and villages sit in today's Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine now, under different names in different languages — often not even simple translations. I found each one by hand, with Wikipedia's help, one tedious search at a time.

And when I finally had the points, I still couldn't draw a simple line between them: the apps insisted on routing me through modern border crossings. But those soldiers just walked through the woods. All I wanted was one clean snapshot of that journey — instead I got bold blue zigzags, impossible to read. So I decided to make my own map.

What it is

A quiet tool for making honest historical maps — the figures for a book about my family.

Borders that
movedPeriod-correct frontiers from open, print-safe historical data — the Commonwealth, the partitions, the Second Republic, today.
People & placesPins for homes, schools, farms and camps — with notes and the names they were known by, in every language.
JourneysThe routes they walked and were deported along, measured across the real terrain.
The old plansThe actual 1937 street plan of Wilno, laid precisely over the modern map.

The Maptopus app showing Poland in 1939: the Second Republic outlined in green, with Wilno, Lwów, Warszawa and Kraków in Polish and the neighbours named in their own languages — Deutsches Reich, Lietuva, CCCP. A panel on the left lists the map layers; the period menu is open on kingdom, commonwealth, the three partitions, the Second Republic and today. — Seven periods, from the kingdom to today — and the octopus, keeping an eye on the map.

How it's made

I'm not a coder. I'm building it anyway — and somewhere along the way, I became one.

Maptopus is also a record of learning to build with AI: getting to know the tools the way you get to know people, each with its own way of working — almost a personality. Claude gives me structure and quick decisions, and tends to ask a good question before it answers. ChatGPT spills out pages and rarely a straight line, but that wandering turns into playful brainstorming and ideas from another direction. Between the two of them — and a good deal of stubbornness on my part — this got made.

Every border is traced to a source that's safe to print; every old plan is aligned by eye to the ground it maps. A small, personal piece of software, made the way you'd restore a photograph — patiently, with the people in it always in mind.

The story behind the name — and working with Claude and ChatGPT — coming soon