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Writing Personal Histories: Creating a Timeline

Once you have completed the interview it is important to sort through the material and decide how you are going to include it in a personal history. Rarely as you interview do you end up hitting all the events chronologically. One way to help you sort through and decide what to write about and the order is to create a time line. Once you have done this you can also include the timeline in the personal history. It can be a great reference point for any personal history.

First you will need to draw a basic line that spans the life of the person. You may want to use a larger sheet of paper for your first time line. You can mark off spaces to represent years. This will help you to properly space the years so that you do not have a place where you do not have room to list the events.

Next go through your interviews and record the events in context of the year that it happened. It may surprise you to see that several significant events happen close together, while nothing seems to happen other years. This is okay and to be expected. When things happen close together see if they are related, you may be able to create a section or chapter around a theme or those events in the family history.

Once you have the time line you may see patterns that you can pull together to write about events. You can also easily divide a life up by ten years and write about what happened each decade. As you see the events and the things that mattered you can work it in around the time line. For example talking about the person’s childhood also works with talking about how his parents influenced him. When you talk about the twenties or thirties possibly how his wife and children affected his family. This allows you add scope to the story.

A timeline also makes it easier to add in the journal entries and letters that you have access to. This makes figuring out what goes where that much easier. These letters can offer your readers a more direct look into your subject’s life. It may also be interesting to include letters from his wife or other people to him.