Family Ancestry

The top three ways to get your family history started – No. 3: A timeline chronology

A timeline chronology has two components: 1) the date or date range and 2) the events associated with the date or date range.

Your timeline chronology should match the period covered by your family history.  It may be a family from birth to death of the mother and father.  Or a family from marriage to death.  Or a family through a certain time period.  Or two or three generations from birth to death.  Or a family from mother and father to the birth of youngest child.  You get the idea.

It is usually best to keep your timeline chronology simple.  To fit the blog approach, make the date the headline.  Then list the event or events of that date under the headline.  You can use bullet points available in your blogging platform for the events listing.

Listing the date on the left and the events on the right side of a page may seem desirable, but this approach means you have to learn additional technology to present a left and right side of your timeline chronology in a blog.  You may know how to make a “table†in Microsoft Word, but it may not copy well to a blog. You probably should not tackle this additional challenge if you are a beginner.  If you are convinced that you must have a left-right timeline, send me an email (see website at end of this article) and I will try to help you or give you some alternatives, like making a timeline chronology as a PDF so that people can both see it online and download it.

You can, of course, include as many events as you wish.  However, usually you will find that 1) you want your listed events to each be about the same level of importance which limits the number of events and 2) if you list too many events, your timeline becomes more than a summary overview of your family history.  Don’t worry about complete sentences when listing events. What you want is an overview of the important dates and events – in addition to helping your readers, your timeline will help you and your collaborators get organized.  Think of it as the first thing your readers will review.  If you like, you can go back later and link events in your timeline to longer narratives in your completed family history, although the Categories established in your blog should be your primary navigation links.

Enlist the aid of your older family members – they will remember additional events and add their own point of view, thus improving the timeline.  Explain that your overview timeline includes only dates and events identified under each date.

A checklist of possible events to include in your timeline chronology will be helpful to you:

-         Births, marriage, deaths, graduations

-         First job

-         Significant occupational change

-         A business or land purchase

-         Move to a new location or a new city

-         Build a new house

-         A special vacation or family reunion

-         A significant achievement

-         A special holiday or trip

-         Special war-related events

-         An accident or injury

-         An influential community event

-         A societal or cultural event

©  Copyright  January, 2009 by Dale Garden   

About the Author

Wrote and published extensive online ancestral family history, then began to help others do their own online family histories.

Formerly a corporate manager and management/business consultant now retired.

Look at http://budurl.com/qlj3 for additional ideas about what to include in a timeline chronology.

Sign up for my ongoing blog feed at http://budurl.com/hszu

And, as always, go to http://dgaweb.com for all the resources that I make available.

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