Monday, December 14, 2009

OurTimeLines.com works great!

Have you checked out the timelines created by the website www.OurTimeLines.com yet?

The website says:

"This web site generates truly fascinating personalized web pages for you. They show how your life (or the life of anyone else you choose - for instance, your descendants and ancestors) fits into history as we know it.

"You can generate as many timelines as you like. If you're into creating web pages, you can even take the timelines we generate for you here and put them on your own pages - an unmatched personal touch everyone will enjoy.

"In addition, you can insert up to ten custom, color-coded personal time segments (events or ranges) in a time line. These might include schooling, marriages, job assignments, military service and so forth."

The site is free to use. However, if you use their timelines in your web page or a publication, you need to attribute the information to them and put their copyright notice on your product.

At the bottom of the home page is a link to the "Create a Timeline" page at http://www.ourtimelines.com/create_tl_2c.html (two screens):



The user can put their name, or an ancestor's name, in the form, along with a birth year and a death year. I used "Isaac Seaver" born "1823" and died "1901" in the form. Note on the top screen the "Printable" link and check box. We'll return to that later.

In the second screen above, the white spaces in the purple background are for the user to insert the "custom facts" for the person being input. I could put Isaac Seaver's, his birth, his death, his three marriages, the births of his five children, the deaths of his first two wives, his civil War service, when he lived in different towns, etc. in the ten blanks provided. But I run out of blanks for all of the events in old Isaac's eventful life. For the timeline below, I didn't input any Facts for Isaac.

After a clicked on the "Generate Timeline" link, the Timeline for Isaac Seaver (1823-1901) appeared (two screens shown):


The list extends several more screens down to 1901.

The user can create a black type on white background by checking the box next to the word "printable" and clicking again on the "Generate Timeline" button on the "Create a Timeline" page. Here is the top of the Isaac Seaver printable timeline:




The user can save the web page as an .htm file, although my system warns that it might not save correctly (it looks just like the above to me). The user can copy and paste the timeline into a word document, although the user might have to adjust the page setup and the table lines to make it look acceptable. The timeline is editable in a word processor also. It's not as "good looking" as the saved HTML file!

This site can be very useful in understanding the history that occurred, and possibly affected, the lives of our ancestors.

Thank you to Elissa Scalise Powell for the link to this website.

1 comment:

Eileen said...

It looks like a great site if I could get into it. I tried night and tonight and my browser won't connect. It just says waiting until it times out. Hope to be able to see it in person some day.