Ancestry Magazine

Like piecing together a puzzle, creating a family history timeline can help you see the bigger picture.

Because family historians strive to understand their ancestors and their lives beyond the dates we note on a pedigree chart, a timeline can be used to place our ancestors’ lives in historical perspective. Researchers can gain a better understanding of a royal succession, a sequence of military events, or even the history of the universe when a visual, linear representation is placed before them.

A straight line is the shortest path between two points. But in a person’s life, the path from birth to death is never straight, even though the time continuum it follows is as straight as our definition of time allows it to be. Thi s temporal relationship—exhibited by matching a person with key events in a given period of time—can enrich our understanding of an ancestor’s life.

Timelines often consist of a horizontal line dissected into time segments with pertinent dates and events intersecting the line at the appropriate points. But timelines can also be presented in other forms like graphs, interactive icons on a website, maps, and even pedigree charts.

Timelines provide us with an orderly, encapsulated view of the past. They are clear and structured ways to help us make connections, solve puzzles, and interpret lives. Over the course of history we have measured time to the best of our abilities by taking what nature has given us (the earth’s rotation on its axis and its journey around the sun), and dividing it into consistent measurements of centuries, years, days, hours, and so forth. Therefore, we have measurable and logical time patterns with which to structure timelines.

Timelines and Genealogy
Family historians love dates, facts, lines, and charts, so a “line of time” is a natural device. There are a variety of ways to use a timeline. Some uses include:
• Making sense of how two families became one.
• Proving (or disproving) family stories.
• Understanding how historical events influenced an individual or family.
• Interpreting migration patterns.

Types of Timelines
One of the simplest timelines you can create is not a line at all, but a chronological list of written events. This would more accurately be called a chronology, but it also represents an outline of content, organized by date, that can lead to a more visual timeline. In fact, one of the most memorable “ah-ha!” genealogical moments I’ve had recently was a result of a very simple chronology.

One of the stories in my family is that my great-gr andfather and his brother took on grown-up responsibilities at an early age when their father, Charles Cummings, died at the age of fifty-four. The sons were twenty-five and twenty-three. And although the youngest of the four children was only ten, it puzzled me that this was an uncommon enough catastrophe for a family at that time that it would still be talked about 100 years later. Was there something missing from our family’s oral tradition?

After creating a chronology of family events during the same time period, I could see more clearly that Charles’ widow, Hannah Maria (Grinnell), had lost her mother two and a half months earlier, leaving her with a seventy-nine-year-old father to care for in addition to the ten-year-old daughter, as well as the family furniture-making business. One son was summoned home from studying in Germany and another sacrificed his early career to take over the family business similar to George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life. My perspective cleared as a result of a very simple chronology.

How to Make a Timeline
Although writing a simple chronology is a useful tool in and of itself, it also serves as an outline toward creating a more visual timeline. To develop a timeline, ask yourself the following questions:

What do I want to accomplish with this timeline?
Define a particular puzzle you want to solve. As an example, let’s use an ancestor’s military history. I’ve mentioned in previous columns that my great-great-grandfather Joseph Collingwood wrote hundreds of letters during his days in the Civil War. In this case, I want to follow his military career and match the dates of his letters with his military engagements, the war itself, and life events for his parents, siblings, wife, and children. My goal is not to solve a puzzle, but to gain some insight into the years he served and how they related to the war in general and his absence at home.

Who is my audience?
Do you want to create a timeline for your own research purposes, to share with family members, or to publish in a book or journal? Your final product may be rougher if you create it as a research aid for yourself rather than if you want to impress a family member. An editor will need something polished and irrefutable. The timeline I’m creating is something I’ll want to give to my cousins as a package of insights into our connection to an individual, yet I also want to leave open the possibility of publishing it someday as a methodology example.

How will I present it? Graphs, text, linear representation, visuals?
We already touched on the importance of beginning with a chronological outline, and you may be content to leave it at that. You can color-code or otherwise format groups of related events, include a summary of conclusions, and be done with it. Maps are also a format to consider if, for example, you’re following two families migrating westward from different parts of the east, and you want to understand how their two paths merged. Graphs are most common in genealogy because so many of the software programs have companion programs that generate timeline graphs once you select the parameters.

To create a Civil War timeline, I don’t want to limit myself to just text and dates. I also want to include portions of letters, photos, and other images to make it an enlightening visual. This may involve a banner-length chart and perhaps a website.

How should I divide my timeline?
Longer time periods need lengthier segments. If you cover a century, you may want to break your line into decades. If you cover a decade, you can separate it into individual years. If you’re covering a person’s life, you’ll want to include some years before and after his or her life. In the case of my Civil War ancestor, I’m starting with events preceding the war and ending after the war. Even though Collingwood died in 1862, his death impacted those who survived him, which should be reflected in my timeline.

What type of events will be important to add to the timeline?
Let’s say you want to trace two immigrant families. You’ll need to include events that impacted their decision to immigrate (e.g., wars, changes in religious tolerance, poverty, epidemics) as well as events in the United States that drew them here and determined their final residence.

I am descended from two nineteenth-century German ancestors who emigrated from different parts of Germany for different reasons, had different religious beliefs, and vastly different family groups. But both settled in Erie, Pennsylvania, where they married and raised a family.

For them, I would need to include events from Bavaria and Prussia, as well as information on the overall unsettled atmosphere of the German Empire. My male immigrant ancestor was one of seven brothers, each of whom came to America at different times. I would want to include his family’s and the wives’ families migration information to see how they may have influenced my great-grandfather’s decisions and relationships.

Alternatively, the Civil War timeline I’m working on will obviously include battles, political events, family vital events, and anything that impacted my ancestor’s regiment as well as his family in Massachusetts.

You’ll want to list all the relevant individual and family events you know of (e.g., births, deaths, marriages, residences) within the time period you’ve chosen, then intersperse the other pertinent events like wars, local news, epidemics, and even weather, if it may have affected the family or their situation.

Where will I get my information?
Just as you confirm and cite every date and reference in your genealogy, so too will you need to thoroughly check and docu ment the dates and events you use in your timeline. Footnotes and citations are expected.

DoHistory is one of my favorite websites for making history come alive. Visit DoHistory and click on “If you’re interested in … genealogy.” Take a look at the section for “creating a timeline” to find additional information about making your own timeline. You will also find several other useful tools and insights on this website.

Find Pertinent Data
If you have already compiled your family’s events for a timeline, but you need to add the dates that relate to your timeline’s purpose, you’ll find plenty of historical detail in almanacs, encyclopedias, and history books at your local library.

The Internet is also overflowing with dates, timelines, facts, and nearly everything else you could want. Some of the websites I rely on for dates include:

The History Place has data on America’s wars, presidents, the Irish Potato Famine, twentieth-century events, and more.

HyperHistory has links to color-coded “lifelines” and timelines for major civilizations.

WhoWhatWhen has interactive historical timelines where you can plug in a date and find out who was living and what was happening.

Google or your preferred Internet browser. Search on “timeline” or “chronology” with a place name, time period, invention, or event, and you’ll have more hits than you’ll know what to do with.

Use Software
If you use genealogy software to organize and interpret your data, you are probably already familiar with its timeline capabilities. All the programs that support timelines also have links to additional timelines, or event sets, that you can import and add to your charts.

Reunion for Macintosh has built-in capabilities for creating timelines and the Leisterpro.com website provides additional tools for users. While Legacy and Family Tree Maker have some timeline capabilities built into their programs, they interact very well with Genelines, a timeline charting tool by Progeny Software. It adds significantly to your timeline options. Family Tree SuperTools by Wholly Genes Software, producer of The Master Genealogist, also works with most Windows-based genealogy programs to create timelines.

Explore the Potential
Once you take a timeline through a few simple steps, you’ll likely discover gaps in your research or discover a correlation you had not previously considered. You will also gain an enhanced perspective of how your ancestors fit into their families, communities, and historical circumstances. In some ways, a timeline can be the outline of a life that leads you into a more compelling work, like a biography or history.

When you work on your timeline, you may discover yourself mentally entering an ancestor’s life and historical arena. By doing so, you’ll gain a more complete understanding of how your forebears lived and appreciate their unique roles in history and your family’s past.

Laura G. Prescott is the membership campaign director for the New England Historic Genealogical Society.