Saturday, November 22, 2014

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Make a Timeline for an Ancestor



Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night again - 
time for some more Genealogy Fun!!



Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):


1) Have you created a Timeline for one of your ancestors using a genealogy software program (e.g., Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, Legacy, Reunion, etc.) or an online family Tree (e.g., Ancestry Member Tree, FamilySearch Family Tree, Geni, MyHeritage, etc.), or in a spreadsheet (e.g., Excel) or in a word processor table?


2)  If not, try to create a timeline using the program/website of your choice.  If so, create another one for the ancestor of your choice!

3)  Show us your Timeline creation, and tell us how you did it.  Which program/website did you use, the process you used, and how you captured the images to display your timeline.

4)  Share your Timeline creation on your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or on Facebook or Google+.

Here's mine:

2)  I chose to use the RootsMagic 6 genealogy software program, which has both a Timeline View and a Timeline Report.  I chose my great-grandfather, Henry Austin Carringer (1853-1946) for this exercise.

3)  Here is the "Timeline View" format in RootsMagic 6:



The "Timeline View" for a person has columns for "Age," "Facts," "Date," "Details," "place" and icons for Notes, Sources, and Media (the green check marks)   The "Timeline View" added the immediate family members (parents, siblings, spouses, children) to the list without my having to request it (you can select the options in the "Options" button on the "Timeline View" menu).  I really like this view, but, other than using a screen capture like above, I could not find a way to print out this list in color 

The second option to produce a Timeline is to use the Reports menu > Lists item > Timeline (chronology) item, and select "Individual Timeline list," select a person from the "Select others to include in timeline," select the person, and then create a group by using "Mark group" and picking "Family of highlighted person" (which adds parents, siblings, spouses and children events).

Here are the two pages for the Timeline:



I also requested "Sources" in an Endnote format (three screens):



The process:  After I made the Timeline Report, I saved it as a PDF file.  I opened the PDF file, and used the Windows Snipping Tool to capture each page as an image, which I added to a presentation document, then saved each image, and then added the images to this blog post.

This "Timeline (chronology)" report is very plain - but it is very useful.  I love having the sources provided as an option.  I saved this timeline report to Henry Austin Carringer's family file.

I would like to see a little more information about the relationships - for instance, identify the family persons as son, daughter, wife, father, mother, brother, sister, etc.  Ideally, some color would be helpful too.

4)  I did it above!


Copyright (c) 2014, Randall J. Seaver


4 comments:

Janice M. Sellers said...

Hi, Randy,

This was a fun exercise! Thanks for thinking of it. Here's the (short) timeline I created tonight:

http://ancestraldiscoveries.blogspot.com/2014/11/randy-seavers-saturday-night-genealogy.html

Janice

Lisa S. Gorrell said...

Here's mine!

http://mytrailsintothepast.blogspot.com/2014/11/sngf-timelines.html

Lisa

Carrie Smith said...

What a fun one! :) Here's mine! http://underthenuttree.blogspot.com/2014/11/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-challenge.html

Chriss said...

Thanks for the task. I've posted mine on my blog.

Curating Kin