I have been looking at land grants and deeds in Rowan, Surry, and Stokes County, North Carolina for the past few weeks. Land has a tendency to pass between several sets of hands and over the course of 50 years can also pass through several county boundaries, so it's important to keep very good records in order to not lose track of what you are looking at.
Although I have been implementing my research logs and they have helped me tremendously, I have taken one step further to help me visualize my data upon quicker glances using a timeline. I am using an excel-based timeline template that I found a few years ago. This timeline is different from many others in that it's FREE and it allows me to enter all of my information in to the spreadsheet with one column being the year and the other column being the event description. This information is then automatically incorporated into the horizontal timeline. I can then customize the placement of the events according to height. It was very easy to create this simple, yet effective timeline.
Here is what my finished timeline looks like:
You can download a copy of this timeline for your own personal use here
Check out Pam's timeline for Jonathan Seavey on her post 13 Children, 5 Child Graves
Very nice illustration. Thanks for the tip.
ReplyDeleteYou are very welcome. I hope you can use it too!
ReplyDeleteI'm using timelines more and more. Really like the look of this. Thanks for the link.
ReplyDeleteThis looks amazing, Ginger. Thank you. I do no brainer versions with Excel but this is so much better.
ReplyDeleteI love this Ginger! Thanks for sharing and good luck find the parents!
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome Linda, Susan, and Jenna! I really like this one because it offers the visual data and also I can put the data in the table.
ReplyDeleteAnother great find for today! Thanks Ginger - so helpful.
ReplyDeleteI have never been a fan of time lines, but, this one is really nice Ginger, gonna have a look at the download. Simple, effective, yummy!
ReplyDeleteYou are welcome Celia! Carol, me neither, but I found this one to be easy to use and easy to customize the heights of the descriptions.
ReplyDeleteThanks for the tip, Ginger. We often recommend using timelines to people writing family history books. We'll suggest they check out your post as a good example of their value.
ReplyDeleteThank you Nancy and Biff! I hope some of your clients/students/readers can use it!
ReplyDeleteI just came across your blog through Kathryn's Quest. I have also had great luck with timelines, especially when trying to fill gaps. It's nice to see someone else's take on the timeline layout.
ReplyDeleteHi Heather, Yes, it's always nice to hear about others using timelines and to see what different format people are using. Thanks for stopping by. I have been following your blog for a couple of years now. You always produce very nice stories.
DeleteI was searching for Excel tree draw or timeline templates and ended up here. I am going through the same dilemma with some families reported in various years of tax records in Hungary .I was happy to see you are still blogging. So many great research stories as always ! And thanks for the template.
ReplyDeleteThanks for reading... again :-) Yes, I would love to write more...as you probably know.
Delete