Tuesday, October 24, 2006

Life History Charts

We live in a visual society - many people learn well from pictures and graphics. I've been searching for a way to plot life events for some time, to the point of experimenting in Microsoft Excel with events and timelines, but the result has never been close to what I wanted.

I saw a reference to a free timeline chart at www.EveryDayBiographies.com today, and thought I would try it. The Zip download was easy, and the program opened easily and saved on my computer.

The web page notes:


Where they lived, the jobs they had, the celebrations, the weddings, the sad events - seeing them all on paper gives us a fascinating overview of their lives. It’s one that your entire family would love to share.

Feedback from people who have developed a loved one’s life chart:

“Seeing it all down on paper made me realise what an amazing and eventful life he had.”

“I got my sister and brother involved and they remembered things that I had totally forgotten about.”

“Since we did the chart, my daughter now feels she has a much better feel for what her dad was doing at her age and during the next ten years.”

If you look at the examples on the web page and in the download, you get the idea of how it works - you specify an event, define the years they occurred, add some text and hit Enter. Do it for the important life events and you have a graphical picture of your life. You can add color and other details as you wish. You can print the life events chart out and save it as an Excel chart if you choose.

This looks like a tool that is easy to use and may be very helpful in preparing my next family newsletter or a wall display at the next Family History Day.

The www.EveryDayBiographies.com web site has many more functions - you can submit your life memories and information and they will write a book for you - for a cost, of course.

1 comment:

Jasia said...

Thanks for the tip Randy. I've not seen this software before. It's looks really interesting. I always like visuals :-)