Time lines display concurrent events in the lives of our ancestors and the world in which they lived. We can gather the information we have on each individual or family and create a time line, incorporating whatever other historical facts we wish to use.
As a genealogist, you need to know about history—a general knowledge of the historical era is needed in order to analyze fully your research. If you ignore history, you may be turning your back on a very useful research tool. Let's say you have an immigrant ancestor who set up shop as a doctor around 1780. Where did he get his training? Did he practice medicine in the country he left? Was he educated in the "old country" or did he find training in his new homeland? Would he have gone to a university or medical school? What sort of medical training was available for that time period? Would he have served an apprenticeship? Did physicians at that time period have a good social standing, or where they looked upon as the working class? What laws might have had influence on his occupation? In general, how much was a doctor paid? How much would that money worth today? Would he be considered wealthy? Would he be able to purchase land?
What if you have an Irish ancestor who was adopted into a British family around the 1800's . . . were there adoption laws that early? Was the adoption instead a guardianship? What laws regulated guardianships at that time? Why was the adopting family chosen to take in the child? Might there be some formal records regarding the adoption/guardianship? Assuming the child was Catholic, how large a role would religion play at that time? Were there laws regarding Catholics which might have some bearing on the child's fate?
You can see why a grasp of history is important to place the circumstances of an ancestor's life in context. The problem most genealogists face is getting that grasp without drowning in a sea of history books. Unfortunately, finding the book you need is up to you and your reference librarian — online you can conduct searches for history sites specific to the area you are researching. Once you've found a site, look for a bibliography (most historians and history buffs are keen on bibliographies). Note the books that interest you, and locate a copy through your local library or by searching online library catalogs. Bookstores are also a good source of book ideas, both general history and genealogy-specific.
If you were anything like me when you were young, you probably didn't learn much history by trying to memorize events and dates. (You were more concerned with what you were having for lunch that day or what the gang was doing on Saturday night, right?) Even if you did enjoy history you may have discovered that it's difficult to keep it all straight in the archives of the human mind.
Have you ever thought about creating your own family history time line? Some of us learn better by doing, and by seeing things plotted out in an orderly fashion. Many encyclopedias have time lines where historical events are ordered in a path from early to recent. These can be fun and educational to view. (Try an Internet search for some good examples.)
When my daughters were younger I gave them a history assignment. They were to make personal time lines using information gleaned from baby books, old calendars, newspaper articles, and our New World Encyclopedia. Dividing butcher paper into two long sections horizontally, they listed the major events in their own lives on the top and chose various world and US news items for the bottom. Every couple of inches they wrote in a different year: 1980, 1981, and 1982 . . . until the present.
It was interesting to see which events they chose for each year and why. After the research was done the time lines were decorated, laminated, and hung in the hallway of our home. We received some favorable comments on the project and I think it helped the girls to better understand what was going on in the world around them at the time of their births and in the decade or more that followed.
Can you picture a time line that takes in the major happenings in the lives of two or more of your related families? What if you took your dad's side of the family and made a time line listing births, marriages, and deaths during the period of the Civil War on to the present? Not only would it help you understand what was going on during that time but you might have a better idea of how it affected your ancestors. Just like a chart or graph of sales or company growth helps employees in a business see patterns and plan for the future, a time line can assist you in your genealogy.
You can make your family time line from almost anything. Decide ahead of time how long a period it will cover and how much space you need for each year or decade. Check your genealogy software program's chart options. Perhaps you can build your time line by printing out customized pages. If you are especially artistic, you might want to draw or paint a background on your time line. You can also cut out pictures from magazines that help illustrate an event or era. You won't have room to list every individual or occasion, so choose those that interest you most.
It's possible that while you are working on your time line or after it's finished, you might make a discovery you didn't see before. Hopefully you can put two and two together and see how historical events may have influenced your ancestors in their decisions to move, enlist in the Army, marry, or even go prospecting for gold!
Why not get your own children or grandchildren involved? It might be a good project to begin some rainy day or for family home evening. Whether you use it just as an aid to research or you decide to frame it for posterity, be creative and have fun making your time line!
Creating a Time Line
The best time lines reflect the events of the world-at-large, country, community, family, but personalize it to be relevant and useful to you. Types of time lines:
- butcher paper (hand-made)
- computer-generated
- family
- personal
- roughed in for your own use in further research
- suitable for framing
If you want to do a scrapbook, or just a binder, I recommend the "line down the middle of the page" method. It looks more interesting than just using the left margin line on lined paper, and would look imbalanced if all of the information is off to one side or the other. Use separate pages for each period of time that you illustrate. If a time period was particularly active, you could then add pages to represent that time period in more detail.
Some possible personal milestones include the following:
| birth | ||
| purchase of home or property | ||
| baby book items | ||
| paying taxes | ||
| baptism or dedication | ||
| joining a church | ||
| inoculation records | ||
| moving | ||
| "firsts" | ||
| appearance in court | ||
| birth of siblings | ||
| appearance in census as an | ||
| membership in a club | adult household member | |
| fraternity \ society | ||
| pension recipient | ||
| school entrance | ||
| land grand recipient | ||
| exams | ||
| Bar/Bat Mitzvah | ||
| First Communion | ||
| Eagle Scout | ||
| sale of home or land | ||
| divorce | ||
| Confirmation | ||
| starting a family, etc. | ||
| immigration | ||
| appearance in census | ||
| grown children marrying | with family | |
| (announcement in newspaper) | ||
| family reunions | ||
| a will | ||
| graduation from school | ||
| record of death | ||
| diary or journal entries | ||
| obituary | ||
| military service | ||
| place of burial | ||
| school yearbook gleanings |
To state the obvious:
Your ancestors were people just like you with full lives and a full range of experiences and emotions.
Get to know them by what they left behind, whom they associated with, what they did for a living, where they moved and why.
Relating ancestors with historical events, teaches us to look for records about those people in relation to the records of those events.
Our ancestors then become "people of history," and we are able to learn new information about them and their families.
Flesh them out! Remember that they weren't always old folks.
Historical Resources Online
There are thousands of historical sites online, dealing with everything from basic history, to history of specific fields, functions, items, occupations, lands, locations, countries, wars . . . you name it, and there's likely a history site for it. There are also several Time Line sites available also featuring a plethora of related subjects.
When conducting a search of online historical resources do not neglect national libraries. Most national libraries have a Web site with information and often make material available online such as oral histories, documents, and historical photographic collections. Historical Society sites can also be very useful and informative, and have the benefit of concentrating on the your family's area.
There are many more URLs of photographic collections, historic documents, national libraries and the like than I can list in this lesson, but I encourage you to you to fire up your favorite search engine and locate more of these sites yourself. The following provides an eclectic collection of Web sites that I have found useful or interesting. Many of the sites will lead you to other sites of interest.
Internet Time Lines Sources
There is a website that will help you create a timeline and add relevant, contemporary-to-the-individual events.
You can try it out FREE at
OurTimeLines.com
For those of you with a Texan in your ancestry, here's a link to a contemporary Texan timeline:
LoneStarGenealogy
Illustrate your time line with family photographs or drawings, pictures of awards, or other decorations that relate to special events in your families lives. As an added bonus, include pictures or notations about historical events that had special meaning to you. These could include pictures of a new president after an election; a favorite sporting team winning a championship; the dedication of a temple, an illustration of important church events in your life. This family time line scrapbook or binder can be added to by all members of the family and will become a treasure. Eventually as children marry and move away, each family member will want a copy of the family time line, and it isn't hard to simply photocopy the pages of your record (even in color), or scan it onto a computer disk, and give every person in the family, their own copy to build on with their own families.
If you can make a Family Time Line, you can also make a Family History Time Line. There are several different ways to approach this idea, and it really is up to your own imagination to figure out how you want to do it with your family. For my example, have a single line chart, but instead of working from the past and bringing it to the present, do it in the other direction. Work from your birth and go back. Again use family pictures to illustrate special dates and events, but add notations, pictures, and other illustrative materials to represent events in church history, American history, and world history. This way, as you identify ancestors and place them on your time line, your family will be able to relate them with those famous events that you and your children learn about in school.
For instance, great grandpa may have been born in 1903, the year the Wright Brothers invented the airplane. A picture or notation about the early airplanes might be on the same mark as a picture of great grandpa. Ancestors born in the 1840s might be illustrated with information about the Civil War in the 1860s. These events are markers in history that we are all familiar with because of our history classes in school, and relating them to the lives of our relatives and ancestors re-enforces our memory of family history.
Software
Progeny Software upgraded their unique Timeline Maker Software. With the ability to automatically read your family tree database directly, Genelines is a full-featured and powerful timeline charting program. Genelines includes a suite of seven different timeline chart formats, consisting of two biographical and five relationship charts. Each of these seven charts can be customized according to: timeline, historical events, personal or family events, colors and fonts. You can even customize charts according to people, line of descent or family group, personal life details, color, and the history you wish to depict.
These charts make attractive additions to your website and published genealogy and provide with new ways to view and analyze your data.
The visual estimated dates show you where additional research is needed.
The comparative bibliographic chart lets you compare two individuals who are candidates for being merged in your database.
You can visit Progeny and learn more about Genelines at
ProgenySoftware.com
Another program is ByGones, a computerized genealogical note-keeping system. It can create an "index" of the information in your research notes, keep track of genealogical correspondence and correspondents, and create time lines for your families. ByGones can create to do lists of pending research tasks, enter information on sources that are important for your family history research, enter information on the localities you do research in, enter spelling variations and SOUNDEX codes for your surnames, and enter scanned maps, scanned family pictures, and scanned documents. Oh, and it is FREE.
ByGones is great for notebook/laptop on-the-go research. It can be found at:
ByGones
Wrapping it up
Time lines helped me see which ancestors in different lines (but maybe living in the same vicinity) were contemporaries.
They showed me better the length of people's lives and what a disparity in generations there often is, i.e.: on one side a great-great grandfather lived about the same time as a great-great-great grandfather in another line.
Another time line pointed out other men in my families who may have served in the Civil War that needed looking up. It also brought home to me the fact that it really wasn't all that long ago that the War Between the States occurred.
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