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In this post

How timelines help your genealogy

How to make a timeline in Excel

What events to include in the timeline

How making a timeline helped me see conflicting information

Timeline tips

More genealogy organization resources

I used to get a little overwhelmed trying to track the events of all the different branches on my family tree.

My tree software is great for recording things, but I have to click open each event to see any notes. The reports are good, but I can only see the events for one person, making it harder to understand a family group.

I realized I needed another method to see everything that I wanted in one place.

I like Excel and had used it to chart other things, so I decided to give it a try in making a genealogy timeline. It made things much easier for me.

Why timelines are great for genealogy

Timelines are super helpful for your genealogy research, especially for brick wall ancestors.

They help you:

1) Identify gaps in information. Have a huge hole in what you know? What records can help you fill that in?

2) Spot any issues. Is anyone in two places at once? Does any information conflict?

3) Track name changes. When and where were they using a name?

4) Sort people out. Some of us have families where first names were used every generation and kids’ names were recycled by parents if a child died. Timelines can help you sort out people with similar names.

5) Better understand their life. How long did someone live at an address or work for a certain company?

6) Narrow down event years. If you don’t know a birth/death/other event year, it can help you narrow down the timeframe.

Related post: Why isn’t my ancestor in the census?

How to make a genealogy timeline in Excel

There are a bunch of different methods for making timelines to trace your family. For easily laying things out and spotting issues and gaps in information, I use Excel. Any spreadsheet program, like Google Sheets, is good.

I keep mine pretty simple because I have a separate detailed transcription for every document I have on a person. It helps me distill all that detail into an easily scannable document.

I like to have a timeline for an entire family group so I can see the family as a whole. It shows me the bigger picture.

I can see in what order people immigrated, how the family was moving around as a group, and where to do some collateral research.

I have columns for only the basics:

1) The date. Sometimes you don’t have a full date for something, like a city directory. In these cases, I use the year or the month and year. See below for tips on inputting this.

2) Who. Which person is this information for? If your timeline is for only one person, rather than a family, an option would be to record what name they used for that event. This can help track name changes.

3) The event. Was it a birth, a census, did they start their military service?

4) Location. Where did it take place?

5) Notes. I like to add in brief notes, copied from my transcriptions. You can add alternate spellings of names, when vital records began in that place, or anything else that could help you.

6) Source. I keep the source simple here because I keep the formal citation somewhere else. But you can use a full citation if that makes more sense to you.

7) Historical events - local and global. This is optional, but I like to have it because it can help put your ancestor’s world into perspective. You can see what events could have been impacting their lives at that time.

It may give you insight into why your ancestor may have moved or immigrated. I had a client whose family was from Mexico. They moved to Texas the year the Mexican Revolution started, helping the client understand why his family likely immigrated.

It can also point out other records to look for. For example, was there a war going on? Maybe they joined the military.

I don’t get too crazy and list every single thing going on in the world, but I do add events like world wars or events that would affect them more directly.

What events to include

What should you enter into your timeline? Everything!

Even if you only know the approximate year of an event, it’ll help you create windows to narrow down the years and places you need to research.

Births, marriages, and deaths
Censuses
Burial dates
Baptisms and confirmations
School years
Addresses
Military service
Newspaper articles and obituaries
When they immigrated or moved
Naturalization year
Employment information.
Gravestone information. Was a hometown noted? Did the birth or death year differ from other documents?

Lee family example

Here is part of a timeline that I created for one of my Irish branches, Terrence Lee and Honora Sullivan/Soraghan.

The family of Terrence’s sister, Margaret, is also on here. They are the only two known siblings and putting both families on one document is helping me to see movements in Ireland and immigration to, and moving around, the US.

I’ve included when the local Catholic church was founded – 3 years after they arrived. So where did they attend church before that? Something for me to look into.

Making this helped point out an issue I hadn’t thought of from looking at my tree software.

In my tree, I have a Delia Lawler and a Bridget Lawler, both daughters of Margaret Lee and Francis Lawler. Delia is the Americanized version of Bridget, but these two people had a five-year age difference on the records I had for them.

Are they the same person or did one die young and another Bridget was born? I have only one record for Bridget, baptized in Ireland in January 1849. I have several records for Delia with her family in Massachusetts, with births ranging from 1844 to March 1849. Putting the family on a timeline helped point out that these two children are probably the same person and that I need to do more digging to confirm it.

Timeline creation tips

A couple of tips for using your spreadsheet timeline are:

1) Take advantage of the filter and sorting features, especially if you’re tracking many people on one spreadsheet. For example, if you sort by the 1860 census, you can see if there are any family members you may have missed.

You can filter events for one person, so you don’t have to create separate documents for people from the same family.

2) Inputting dates into Excel can get dicey, so you want to be careful. As Amy Johnson Crow points out, Excel is really wonky for entering and sorting dates.

You may not have a complete date for an event, and only a year or a month and a year. Excel doesn’t let you enter complete and partial dates in a consistent format, and sorting can put things more out of order.

For example, if you input a mix of date formats like this:

And then try to sort it, it turns into this:

Not helpful if the 1800s and earlier dates don’t sort correctly.

So, before you enter the date, pick a format. I like to have separate columns for year, month, and day. It feels like it's fewer steps and easier to sort and read, but that’s my personal preference.

Google Sheets is much better about sorting, even if you only have partial dates. But if you ever want to download from Sheets into Excel, you could run into problems.

Looking for other ways to get organized?

Check out these related posts for more on getting your genealogy organized:

Have you ever used a timeline for your genealogy work before? If so, how did it help you?

7 Simple Steps To Creating A Genealogy Timeline (And Why You Need One)