Genealogy Timelines
As I gather the bits and pieces of a person’s life, it becomes very difficult to get a picture of who the person really was. One thing that helps me is to create a timeline of the person’s life. When I see the events in order, a story begins to emerge.
Use your word processing program to do this, so you can move things around. Put the date first, followed by the event. Enter in every fact you have. If you’re not sure of the date, give a range or insert it where you think it may belong.
Once you’ve entered in the information for the person you’re studying, add dates for family members. You need to see what is happening in their lives in order to enlarge the picture. When did the spouse come to the country? When did each child marry? When did children get born and when did they die?
Finally, notice if any important historical events were occurring that might have affected your ancestor. These help to complete the story.
When you’re finished, study the list and try to notice the details. When I did this for Elizabeth Blossom, I realized several things that had escaped me in the past. Elizabeth was the child of Pilgrims. Her parents went to Holland with the Pilgrims and her father and brother set out on the Speedwell, the companion to the famous Mayflower. The mother stayed behind for reasons we don’t know, possibly due to her pregnancy. However, the boat proved leaky and they returned home.
Elizabeth was born the same year, sometime after her father returned. The family didn’t make it to Plymouth until Elizabeth was nine years old. Here is where the timeline became revealing. As I studied the timeline, I realized her father died a mere four years later. Her mother remarried. I had known she remarried, but until I studied the timeline, I didn’t realize she remarried only three months after her husband’s death, and to a man much younger with very small children. Suddenly a picture began to emerge, and questions arose. Thinking of these questions made Anne, Elizabeth’s mother, a real person. Was the trip to the New World something Anne had wanted, or was she just the dutiful wife, now trapped in a world far from home with small children and in a place she never wanted to be to begin with? This question arose because the timeline showed the remarried Anne and her husband fled Plymouth soon after because they found the environment oppressive.
Now this made me think about Elizabeth. She was a nine-year-old when she left the country she had lived in all her life, even though she lived there as an outsider. She lost her father as a young teenager, and found herself with a new stepfather and several very small stepsiblings before she’d had time to finish her grieving…and then they were off to a new world once again. Her life would be one of following her father, stepfather and husband from place to place as they followed favorite ministers after each church split. She must have lived a life filled with the stress of religious contention, parents always getting involved in feuds with other church members and moving away in frustration to start a new church. I noted that after her first husband died, Elizabeth stopped moving.
I also noticed that this woman buried many, many children in her lifetime, often leaving behind little graves as they moved on. I wondered how she coped. Until I made the timeline, I hadn’t noticed how many of her children died before she did.
Take a look at the timeline, on a website for my personal genealogy, and see the stories that emerge. Then try one of your own.
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