Timelines & Narratives

It is important to draft regular summaries of your findings. Two of the forms such summaries can take are the timeline and the narrative.

The timeline is a chronologically arranged listing of events in the life of a particular person or a span of time in the existence of a family. The timeline should reflect the research principle that we work from the present to the past. Thus, a timeline on a particular person should begin with his or her death. It may prove helpful to introduce historical events into the timeline; particularly those of regional significance, which may dictate the availability of records (a tornado that destroyed a courthouse, for example).

A narrative can be as simple as an informal collection of paragraphs about an ancestor, or as elaborate as a multi-generational family history suitable for publication. For most researchers, the more simple paragraph narrative is the precursor to publication. You need not be an award-winning author to present your findings in this manner. Simply compose an accurate and concise summary of your research steps and a condensed version of your findings. Consider such a narrative to be a research status report that can help you to spot inconsistencies in your evaluations as it highlights potential pursuit opportunities.

Lawrence Gouldrup, Writing the Family Narrative (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1992), and the accompanying Workbook (Salt Lake City: Ancestry, 1993) provide guidelines on in-depth narrative writing. Other works are listed below in the bibliography which follows this chapter. Keep in mind that, however you choose to summarize your findings, the organizational forms and the summaries produced should insure that others can reconstruct your research activities. This is achieved by identifying, either through footnote citations or full citations immediately following the entry, the sources of the information and indicating when and from where it was acquired. Richard S. Lackey, Cite Your Sources: A Manual for Documenting Family Histories and Genealogical Records (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1986), gives examples.