Using Timelines

            We have ancestor charts and family group sheets from the software that we use, but they tend to hide many of the details of a person's life.  For a different view of an ancestor, I create a timeline to plot out the events of an ancestor’s life.  You can use a spreadsheet, like Excel, a word processing document, or special timeline software or websites. Whichever tool you choose, creating an ancestor timeline will enliven the dash between your ancestor’s birth and death dates.  If you have a tree on Ancestry or FamilySearch, they provide a time line of events in your ancestor’s life for you.  Use that to look for gaps in your research.

 Here are some reasons to create a timeline:

*Summarize a person’s life

*Focus on further research needed

*Aid in evaluating the quality of another researcher’s work

*Divide an ancestor’s life into workable parts, i.e. childhood, marriage, old age

*Demonstrate how lives interconnect

*Discover discrepancies and inconsistencies

*Eliminate possibilities when two or more individuals with the same name live in an area at the same time.

            There are two keys to effective timelines.  Add as many points as possible.  Make the points as specific as possible. In addition to the birth marriage and death, I add every event that I have for that ancestor -- his residences, occupations, births and deaths of parents and children, newspaper items, education, military data, immigration and travel, burial, etc. Much of this detail would have been lost on a family group sheet.
            See why I think timelines are awesome!  I think they are one of the most effective tools we have for spotting gaps in our research and sparking ideas for more things to look for.