Timelines

Timelines are an invaluable tool for genealogists and family historians. They help us solve problems and see what is missing in our research. There are quite a few webinars and blogs on timelines and how to create them so I am not going to do that here. I am going to share with you what I created.

I asked for some suggestions on our Facebook page and received some wonderful ideas and even some links to view a few timelines listeners created. They were all fantastic and each had something a little different. One included an age column which I thought was very effective and another included what was happening in the world at the same time and I loved that one too. I used some of their ideas and some I found in searching the web and came up with five different timelines that I think, at least for this purpose, worked out very well.

First up, Excel and Word. Everyone has used Excel for something in their research, I know I do for logs and data, so it was pretty easy to create a timeline in Excel. To create the timeline in Word I simply added a table and filled in the columns. These two are pretty similar and both can be adjusted.

As much as I liked these two, I love a good visual graph. I set out to create one using Excel and I have to say that although I did complete the task, it took me WAY TOO LONG to learn how to do it and was ready to throw in the towel a few times and buy a program but I persevered and with the help of a website and youtube video created this:

Ok, it’s good but not great and like I said before, it took way too long. The video shows how to put your data into a power point graph so I thought I would try that next. So much easier and much better looking too.

The very last one I created was really just for fun and because it was out there begging me to create it. I went to Canva.com and searched timeline, chose one and filled in the basic dates, voila!