Your family timeline
Your entries stay in this tab and are not saved when you reload or leave. Download your work to keep it.
A timeline helps you compare a person's movements, relationships, and recorded events. It can reveal a gap or an apparent contradiction, but a tidy chronological display is not proof that every entry belongs to the same person.
Give each event a source and a level of certainty
Enter a year, an optional month and day, the event, the place, and the source. Mark whether the date is documented, approximate, or unresolved. The tool sorts by the date fields and places entries without a known year at the end.
For approximate dates, use the year you want the event displayed near and explain the uncertainty in the notes. The tool does not infer a birth date from an age, convert historical calendars, or calculate whether a relationship is possible.
Year: 1912 Month and day: unknown Event: Household appears in a town directory. Place: [town] Confidence: Documented in the cited source. Note: The directory's publication date does not establish the exact moving date.
Look for questions, not just patterns
Two events in different places may suggest a move, but they may also involve two people with the same name. Compare identity details before joining the records. A gap may reflect missing research, missing records, or an ordinary period with little documentation.
If dates conflict, enter both claims and label them. Removing the inconvenient entry makes the display cleaner but weakens the research. Use the conflict to decide what evidence would help next.
Add context carefully
You may include a historical event that could have affected the family, but identify it as context. A flood occurring near a residence does not automatically prove why a family moved. Keep a source for the wider event and a separate explanation of any connection you propose.
Save a portable version
Download the timeline as CSV before leaving the page. The entries remain only in this tab until you export them. The downloaded table can accompany a research log or serve as a planning outline for a family-history chapter.
Before sharing, review information about living relatives and remove unnecessary private details. A useful family timeline shows what is known, how it is known, and where the next question begins. Its value lies in those distinctions, not in how many events it contains.