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12 April 2015

Keep Your Time Lines Relative

Making an ancestral chronology or timeline is a good way to organize what you know about your ancestor and his or her life.

But try and keep the historical events included relevant to your ancestor's life instead of giving into temptation and adding every event you can think of. My 1865-era German immigrant to the United States, never lived west of the Mississippi River and died in 1912. I don't need the San Francisco Earthquake in his chronology. It's not really relevant to his life.

Adding too much to a chronology that's not related to your ancestor makes it more difficult to use the chronology as an analytical tool.


3 comments:

  1. Can you show us a chronology line, or is there a form available for one?

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  2. That's a good reminder. Thank you for that. I wanted to tell you that I've included your post in my NoteWorthy Reads for this week: http://jahcmft.blogspot.com/2015/04/noteworthy-reads-10.html.

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