Thursday, April 23, 2015

HistoryLines Launched This Week - Post 2: Custom Events

I wrote HistoryLines Launched This Week - Post 1: First Look yesterday, and wanted to show how to add a custom personal event and story to the life story of a person.

I'll use my grandfather, Lyle L. Carringer (1891-1976) again as the example, and use his enlisting in the U.S. Marine Reserves as the example story.

1)  In History Lines, I clicked on the "Add a Story" link (on the left side of the screen, just below "1870" in the timeline) on the page for my grandfather's life story:  



I can then choose from


*  Add Family member
*  Add Birth, Death or Marriage
*  Add Immigration, Relocation
*  Add Residence
*  Add Event

2)  I chose to "Add Event."  An edit box opens with fields for a Title, a Date, a Place, and a Residence place for the event, and the opportunity to add a Photo.  Then the user can add text to describe the Event.  Here is the result for Lyle's Marines story:



3)  When I click the red "+Add to Story" button, this custom story was added to the Life Story in chronological order:



4)  The title of the custom Story was added to the Timeline at the top of the Life Story for the person:



You can see the added title for the 1917 event ("Lyle Joins the U.S. Marines") below "National Park Service" and above "Flu Pandemic."

This is a very useful feature, and is probably the best way to personalize the Life Story with family photographs, documents and stories.  A birth, marriage or death certificate could be added to those Events in the timeline, a baby photo of a child could be added to the child birth event in the Timeline, a photo of an elderly parent could be added for the death of the parent.  U.S. Census records could be added along with a transcript or summary of the family members, including their residence location.  

The "Add a Story" feature will also create events for additional birth, marriage and death events, and Immigration event, a Relocation event, a Residence event, etc.  

I will look at a non-American ancestor in the next post, per reader bgwiehle's suggestion in a comment on the first post.

The URL for this post is:  http://www.geneamusings.com/2015/04/historylines-launched-this-week-post-2.html

Copyright (c) 2015, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.


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