Author: Adam DuVander

Many in the US are tired of arguing over the future of the presidency, so we decided to take a look back at the past. There have been 44 US Presidents, required by law to be born in the United States. Of those, 39 have been buried, often in their home state—either by birth or adoption. The map below shows where each president was born and where each who has died is buried. You can use the BatchGeo Grouping feature to show only births or burials. Or, read on for our analysis of the story told by this map of presidential birthplaces and final resting places.

View US President Births and Burials in a full screen map

The first thing you may notice when looking at the map: there is something in the water in Virginia! Eight presidents were born in The Old Dominion, which is incidentally also nicknamed Mother of Presidents. Additionally, seven presidents are buried in Virginia, so the state is tops for births and burials. Five of the presidents born in Virginia were also buried there, which helps with that total. Two non-Virginians are buried in Virginia, both at Arlington National Cemetery: William Howard Taft and John F. Kennedy.

Ohio is one native son or daughter away from tying Virginia. Ohio’s seven presidents span the ninth, William Henry Harrison, through the 29th, Warren G. Harding. New York and Massachusetts (each with four) round out the only states with more than two presidents. In terms of burials, New York edges out Ohio, with six and five respectively. Tennessee is the burial place of three US presidents, despite not a single president being born in that state.

A president’s state of birth is not always the state we associate with that president. For example, Abraham Lincoln is claimed in Illinois as a native son, but he was born in Kentucky. Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was born in Illinois. Due to his time in Hollywood, and as governor, we think of The Gipper as a Californian. Similarly, both presidents named George Bush are considered Texans. Yet, they were both born in the Northeast (Massachusetts for the elder and Connecticut for the younger).

Despite the split between birthplaces and burials, over half of US Presidents were born and buried in the same state. Six were even returned to their native city for burial: Martin Van Buren (Kinderhook, New York), Herbert Hoover (West Branch, Iowa), Franklin D. Roosevelt (Hyde Park, New York), Lyndon B. Johnson (Stonewall, Texas), Richard M. Nixon (Yorba Linda, California), and Ronald Reagan (Simi Valley, California).

It is interesting to note that no president has been born in New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, or any of the top US cities by population. Further, most presidents were born in the eastern half of the country, which makes sense given that the US started with thirteen colonies and expanded westward. In fact, it wasn’t until after World War II that the US elected someone born west of the Mississippi River. Dwight D. Eisenhower was born in Denison, Texas. Only three other presidents have been born in the west: Lyndon B. Johnson, Gerald R. Ford (Omaha, Nebraska), and Richard M. Nixon.

For hundreds—maybe thousands—of years, it was hard to make maps. People dedicated their entire lives to the craft. While that’s still true today, now there are tools that enable cartographers to share their work so others can build upon their maps. Most importantly, there is a coordinate system that makes it easy for ordinary people to understand and describe points on the earth. While latitude and longitude points have ben around for centuries, GPS and web maps have greatly enabled our ability to use them.

A Quick Latitude/Longitude Refresher

Back in algebra class, you spent way too much time plotting points, lines, and expressions on a grid. These x/y graphs are a simple way to think of latitude (the y axis) and longitude (the x axis). Of course, the earth is not flat, nor even perfectly round, so the reality is more complex. But to make most maps, this is all you need to know.

Latitude of zero is along the equator. Using decimal notation, latitude extends north to 90 degrees and south to -90 degrees. Longitude doesn’t have an obvious zero marker, so the British made one up at the Greenwich Observatory in London. Everything due North and South of that point is zero longitude. To the east, the numbers increase until 180 degrees on the other side of the earth from London. To the west, the numbers decrease until -180 degrees meets 180 degrees in the middle of the ocean.

When we put latitude and longitude together, they form a pair of numbers that can be plotted on a map. For example, zero latitude and -78.455833 longitude is the Mitad del Mundo in Quito, Ecuador, a monument to “the middle of the earth.” If you go to 51.500833 latitude and -0.141944 longitude, you’ll find Buckingham Palace, across town from the Observatory (notice the near-zero longitude).

Often you’ll see decimal notation listed as a pair of coordinates separated by a comma. For example, San Francisco’s Golden Gate Bridge is at 37.819722,-122.478611. When working with coordinates, be sure that you know which number is listed first. You can do this by sanity checking a known location. In this case, you know San Francisco is in the western hemisphere and should have a negative longitude. Also, latitudes are never greater than 90, so that’s another hint here. We go into some greater detail on other ways coordinates are formatted in our latitude and longitude coordinates page.

Mapping a List of Coordinates

Now that you have the basics of latitude and longitude down, let’s make a map! If you know how to code, you could use the Google Maps API directly. But that’s the hard way to make a map. Let’s look at what it takes to build a map from a simple spreadsheet.

Let’s say our spreadsheet looks something like this (your own version probably has many more rows):

Due to potential confusion over the order of coordinates, it’s a good idea to separate them out. Here’s a quick way to do that using Excel-compatible formulas:

1. Add two new columns titled Latitude and Longitude
   
2. To find the number to the left of the comma (latitude in our example), use the formula =LEFT(F2, FIND(“,”, F2)-1) where F2 is the first cell with the pair of coordinates. Then copy that formula down the column.
   
3. To find the number to the right of the comma (longitude in our example), use the formula =RIGHT(F2, LEN(F2)-FIND(“,”, F2)) where F2 is the cell with the first pair of coordinates.
   

To account for the presence of a space after the comma, you can put a TRIM function around each of those formulas. But that’s optional. The important part is separating the coordinates.

View Example Latitude/Longitude Map in a full screen map

Now you can copy your spreadsheet rows, including the header, by highlighting and using the Ctrl+C command (Cmd+C on Mac) to copy it to your clipboard. Now, go to this map-making tool and paste (Ctrl+V, or Cmd+V on Mac) your spreadsheet data into the box. The result is a beautiful web map like the one above, ready to be saved and shared.

Use Geocoding to Find Coordinates of Addresses

If you don’t already have latitude and longitude points for your data, you can use our batch geocoding tool. You can convert addresses, postal codes, city names, and even some landmarks into coordinates and plot them on a map. Just copy and paste your spreadsheet data into the box.

Make your first map now for free.

More data does not produce more insights unless you have a way to analyze the data. In fact, that’s why there are hundreds of functions build into Excel and other spreadsheet software. The functions are what make up its most important functionality. Yet, you can’t use =HEATMAP to create a visualization of geographic density in your data. But what if that was almost as easy as an Excel function?

If you’ve spent any time using Excel, you’ve likely spent what feels like a similar amount of time searching the internet for help with its functions. You probably have come across many custom functions written by other Excel enthusiasts. Though the authors mean well, these sub-routines are often hard to use and have questionable security. For this and other reasons, BatchGeo made sense as a separate web service. We make Google Maps—and heat map overlays—as easy as copy and paste.

How to Make a Google Map

In our in-depth Google Map tutorial, we show some of the technical steps you get to skip when you use BatchGeo. Here’s how to create a basic marker map, which we’ll convert to a heat map in the next section:

1. In your spreadsheet, highlight and copy (Ctrl+C, or Cmd+C on Mac) all rows, including your header row.
2. Go to our map making tool and paste (Ctrl+V, or Cmd+V on Mac) your data into the box.
3. Click “Map Now” and follow the steps to complete your map. We make intelligent guesses of location columns, but you can override them in the Validate & Set Options menu.

You’ll see a preview of your map and, if it looks good, you can save it. Include your email address so you can make edits in the future.

Now you have a map like the one embedded above. All the other data in the map is browsable by clicking individual markers. And we even get an idea of their density by the overlapping markers.

But it’s not a heat map. Not yet.

How to Make a Heat Map From Your Excel Spreadsheet

Now that you have a Google Map, you can easily activate the heat map layer with Advanced Mode available in BatchGeo Pro (30 day money back guarantee).

While signed in and viewing your map:

1. Ensure Advanced Mode is enabled by clicking your account menu in the upper right.
2. Right click (Ctrl+click on Mac) over your map and select “Heat View”

The markers on your map will disappear and be replaced by a heat map view.

You can zoom and pan your heat map as you would any Google Map. Our customers have used heat maps to gain valuable insights from open data, competition research, and more. Many have made decisions that saved or made their company thousands of dollars, or more.

Some example heat map use cases include:

• Map all places in a business category to determine potential new locations that are under-served.
• Map customers or leads to choose equitable sales zones or regions.
• Map a city’s violent crime to show hot spots for a comprehensive journalistic report.

It’s unlikely that Excel will soon have a =HEATMAP function of this caliber, so we’ve created our web service to fill this gap.

Try us out for free and create your first map.