Last week, I ran out of room so I omitted to mention that when you are researching gaps in a timeline, you may find a fact that fits in two or more timelines.

That’s common with a birth, marriage or death but it’s often the case with an article in a local newspaper because it’ll mention other family members or friends.

You may not have timelines for those other family members and you’re most unlikely to have timelines for friends; nevertheless, I recommend adding a column for other people mentioned.

In the case of my great-uncle Arthur, his mother-in-law’s sisters were frequently mentioned in articles.

If I hadn’t recorded them in Arthur’s timeline, I might not have connected the sisters with their marriages to Arthur’s cousins.

Another use for timelines is to fit family stories into timelines, especially if they are recently heard family stories and you can elicit further detail from the narrator.

For example, my grandfather, Harry Lowe, kept us entertained with stories about his father’s, well-meaning but crazy, aunt Alice who kept several generations of solicitors busy.

There are several Alices that this could be, however, creating a row for a family story in a timeline can help to pinpoint the story’s location in time.

There’s a warning that I must add; colour the print red in every row containing a family story, and put the narrator’s name in the source column.

That red colour is simply a warning to the future you that this story may not be true.

If the family story has been told to you recently, fitting the story into the timeline may prompt you to ask questions to complete the other columns on the row: where did they live, what church did they go to, where did they go to school and so on.

After last week’s article appeared, someone commented that constructing a timeline seems like duplication of effort; recording details into a family tree recording system and then into a timeline, means recording the same details twice.

That’s a reasonable criticism.

To be fair, Ancestry, will construct a timeline for you – called LifeStory or Facts but you can’t choose the columns of information nor can you view the timeline as a table.

It’s viewing the timeline as a table that makes the gaps easy to identify, so it’s worth the duplication of effort only for some of the people in your family tree, for example, your direct ancestors.

However, as I have mentioned before, it’s often the case that researching your ancestors’ siblings produces new information about ancestors.

Whilst you can add extra facts in Ancestry, which are equivalent to adding a row in a timeline, Ancestry limits the extra information to the event type, date, location and sometimes an optional description.

So, I can enter cause of death for my father’s half-brother, Kurt, as “shot himself while cleaning his gun” but I can’t add a note that in the 1930s, this was a common euphemism for death by suicide.