Saturday, February 20, 2021

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Create an Ancestor's Timeline

 From Randy (cousin discovery!!) over at Genea-Musings:

it's Saturday Night 
time for more Genealogy Fun!!!


Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1)  Do you use Timelines to help you in your research? Create a Timeline (a chronological list with dates and events) for one of your ancestors that includes their parents, siblings, spouse(s) and children.  Tell us how you did it, and show us your work.

(2)  Tell us all about it in your own blog post, in a comment to this post, or in a post on Facebook.  

Here's mine:

I used Family Tree Maker (FTM) 2019.  First I chose my great-grandmother, Bessie Alice Carter Ranney (1883-1960).  Then I went to Publish → Person Reports → Timeline Report.  As I have said many, many times, FTM leaves much to be desired in their reports, in my opinion. I could not designate who to include in her report, so her parents are not included.  She didn't have any siblings.  

This is what I chose of the options presented:

✓ Include family events

     ✓ Include spouses' birth
     ✓ Include sibling facts

✓ Include historical events

✓ Use custom fact sentences

✓ Include only facts with dates

✓ Include only preferred facts

Here is what I ended up with for my timeline:



There are two pages of events.  I'm not sure why they included historical events from BEFORE she was born or why some of her children's marriages are missing.  I tried another version, unchecking the "Include only preferred facts" box, but still the marriages were not included on the report.  I'll have to do some research into that.  

One good thing is my report does list the relationship of the person to Bessie.  Perhaps I should have chosen someone who had siblings.  Then I would have gotten more relationships and events.  

I have actually been doing some timeline posts here on my blog recently, but I've been using information from Family Search.  I did not realize I had this report available to me!


2 comments:

  1. I think this has been a good exercise in learning how our programs work. I'm sure you'll figure out how to get it to do what you want.

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  2. I love the columns that FTM creates as it makes it very easy to visually scan the details.

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