Family research · Hub · Phase 6 of the world atlas
Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova — three lands that share a common medieval ancestor in Kievan Rus', then spend the next thousand years pulled apart by Lithuania, Poland, the Ottomans, Russia, and the Soviet Union before landing on three separate flags in 1991.
Country pages are coming in a later pass. For now, drag the map's slider below to see the whole region's story at a glance — ten snapshots, eleven centuries.
A real, traced map — actual borders, not schematic shapes. Drag the slider or press play; each snapshot simplifies a messier reality into the dominant power of the moment. Poland, Romania, and the western edge of Russia are now sketched in faint for geographic context; Russia's own vast territory is otherwise excluded and tracked as "off-map" whenever it's the ruling power — Russia gets its own future phase.
Real traced borders (simplified). Poland, Romania, and Russia's near border are shown faint for context only — Russia itself is otherwise left uncolored beyond this map's frame: when Russia is the ruling power, the region is labeled as such, but Russia's own territory isn't drawn or tracked here.
Maps are bad at showing when; timelines are bad at showing where. This uses real transition years instead of the ten arbitrary snapshots above — one horizontal band per land, colored the same way as the map, so you can trace exactly how long each era actually lasted and compare all three directly.
Every land keeps its true color, but anything unchanged from the previous frame fades to low opacity; only the land(s) that actually changed hands stay bold with a solid outline. A caption under each frame spells out exactly what flipped. No slider to operate — scan left to right, top to bottom, and watch the map redraw itself like a flipbook.
This started as a family history project: tracing the flags that flew over the lands our ancestors came from, close enough to paint accurately — correct colors, correct proportions, correct dates. This hub deliberately stops short of Russia itself: its scale and complexity earn it a dedicated future phase rather than a corner of this map.
Every country page (coming in a later pass for Ukraine, Belarus, and Moldova) will carry its own timeline of flags with paint-ready color specs and a per-era location map. Colors are close historical approximations; pre-19th-century swatches especially are informed reconstructions, not official specifications, and are labeled as such throughout. Where this map touches on well-documented, ongoing 21st-century disputes — Crimea, the 2022 invasion — it states only widely-reported facts and stays out of the map's own slider entirely, since those events fall outside the historical snapshots covered here.
This hub is one region in a larger set. See the rest here: