Resources for Minnesota Timelines - Part 2: Using Timelines in Your Family History

In our note last month, we offered suggestions on creating a timeline combined with a knowledge of available resources to remove analyze data and remove brick walls. This month, we'll look at using timelines to look beyond the specific family member to discover how that individual lived and made life choices.

Your timeline includes specific events in that individual's history: birth and/or baptism, marriage, birth of children, school graduation, church membership, land purchase, death, deaths of other family members, etc. with the geographic location where the events occurred. Using the dates and the places, you are now ready to take a broader view of history.

An example may be in order. There are many questions which arise when looking at a series of dates. Why did that person decide to emigrate from the family home in Europe, or to move further west? Why did he/she buy that particular piece of land? Why did they change their religious denomination? Did they know each other before they each came to Minnesota? Questions like these take the researcher from the collecting of dates and other facts into an understanding of the ancestor's place in history.

In our example, you can figure out person's age at emigration and begin to list possibilities to check out. Were men of a certain age required to join the military service, and your ancestor wanted to avoid that duty? Did the legal rights and practices of the homeland leave your ancestor without the means to support himself and his family? Was there another economic reason for moving, free land, possibility of a desire to begin again, the beginning of a new or expanded business, etc.? How long did the trip take? What was it like on the vessel? How did the family or person travel west-railroad? through the Great Lakes? It's time to read local histories of the homeland and the new home. Check out your public library as well as college and university libraries for resources. While you may not find your ancestor named, he or she probably shared similar experiences.

Cyndi's List has an entire category devoted to timelines for family historians. There are very specific locality timelines as well as world event timelines. Depending on how detailed and extensive they are, they typically include major events, such as wars and changing of borders, but may also include specific events for prominent people. An extensive Minnesota timeline, from the 17th century to the current day, includes the visit of French fur traders Groseilliers and Radisson in 1659-1660, Pike's expedition through the territory in 1805, the 1873 blizzard which killed 70, the election of John Johnson as Governor and the peak of the lumber industry in 1905, Bob Dylan's birthday (1941, Duluth), and the visit of Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990.

No one individual lived that long, of course, but a list that extensive can help you place your ancestor within a larger history. Perhaps you have photos of an ancestor looking at flood waters or snow banks. With the dates of these events, you can read the local newspaper (a daily history!) for what it was like for your ancestor. Perhaps you have a family story of your ancestor's attendance at a particular rural one-room school: you can check out maps for the time period and the specific area to identify the school, and then search for the records.

For me, the quickest way to identify something I want to know about an individual is to sketch out a short biography. They tend to be boring when I include only the bare facts. But when I add information from the broader history, they offer a springboard to collect even more family stories from others and make my ancestors into real people.

Timelines are valuable tools to family researchers, both for analysis and problem solving, and making the people come alive in a family history. Try them! You'll find them useful!

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