This summer a cartography expert with an interest in family history, Neil Millington, released the fruit of an extraordinary project to create an animated, three-dimensional ‘fly-by’ of Manchester – in the year 1850. You can see his impressive work in the stills on these pages, and more dynamically in the videos at vimeo.com/137419626 (which imagines flying over the city in a balloon), vimeo.com/138953807 (as if you were travelling in to Manchester on a train during the first years of the railways) and vimeo.com/156700384 .

Discover Your Ancestors spoke to Neil to find out more about the project. (For more on the technicalities of how it was done, see the box bellow.)

What inspired you to undertake this project?
My background in cartography and digital modelling, combined with an interest in Manchester family history.

I also thought it might be useful for people to see a fly-round of where their ancestors lived, or a walkthrough of the journey their ancestors might have taken from home to work each day. When I have completed modelling Manchester in 1850, this is something I hope to offer people for other places.

What have you discovered in your own family tree?
Growing up in Hulme, Manchester in the 1840s, my 3x-great-grandfather must have seen the railways being constructed from his house through his youth. He then worked on the railways in Manchester, eventually becoming a stationmaster in Cheshire.

What sort of equipment did you need to create these 3D fly-bys?
I use 3DS Max software, which runs on any reasonably powerful PC. It takes quite a while to learn the software but its capabilities are really only restricted by your imagination.

How did you develop the skills to use these 3D tools? Are they related to your work at all?
I use 3DS Max modelling and animation software for my work as a 3D animator in the offshore construction industry. I quite often create a 3D model of a port or harbour for the animation. I then created a small area of Manchester to get an idea of the area where my ancestors lived in the 1850s. It has extended and developed from there.

Are you working on more projects of this kind?
I would really love to get Manchester based on the 1850 Ordnance Survey sheets completed and then either move on to Manchester in 1790 (as there are detailed maps from that era). In addition to that, I’d like to create the same style 3D digital model of other cities such as Leeds, Sheffield, Birmingham, Liverpool and London.

Other possibilities are aspects of history such as battlefields and airfields from WW1 and WW2. It’s just a matter of available time and funding.

How do you see this technique developing?
Ideally by completing an area (Manchester in the first instance) and then making it available to anyone to request (for a small fee) a panoramic view of an ancestor’s home or workplace, or a fly-through to recreate their forbears route to work, a canal journey, railway journey, and so on. There are loads of possibilities.