As genealogists, we gather a lot of data. We find our ancestors in many records such as obituaries, death and birth certificates, deeds, wills, church records, tax records, military records, and so on. The list is endless. How do you analyze, process, or understand the information you’ve gathered? And if you’re working on a trickier project, say figuring out which of the 12 George Longs is your ancestor, how do you keep it all straight?

One of my absolute favorite strategies is timelines. Creating a timeline for your ancestor puts his or her life into context and perspective. Obviously (or maybe not), a timeline is a list of events in chronological order. They show the “lifespan” of an individual, a place, or an historical event. Depending on what your goals are, you can create timelines with different focuses. The two main focuses I use are event-focused or document/source-focused.

Each document was created on a date (sometimes you know that date because it is written on the document, sometimes you might have to make an educated guess based on context). By putting together a document-focused timeline you can assess your research and make a plan for any research holes you find.

Documents or sources may list multiple events. A death certificate, for example, will list a date of death, but also may list the birth date, the burial date, the onset of an illness, the date of a coroner’s inquest, etc. An event-focused timeline pulls all those dates out.

As you enter your data into your genealogical software or online tree, if you use them, they may automatically put the events in chronological order, helping you to visualize your ancestor’s life. When I get deep into a project, however, I tend to work in a spreadsheet or word processor so I can reorder things, put in items that may I may not want in my software, add historical context items, and link citations.

Next, we will look at using timelines to compare and analyze your research.