Timeline for William Chappell

23 November 2014, Chriss Coleman

Over on Randy Seaver’s blog he does a weekly event entitled Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, which of course I get on Sunday morning due to the time difference. These little challenges are great for fine tuning your genealogy – you often find things that you didn’t realise you had or items you didn’t realise you are missing.

This week’s task:

  1. Create a timeline in your genealogy software program.
  2. Otherwise, create a timeline using a program/website of your choice.
  3. Show your Timeline and tell us how you did it.
  4. Share your timeline.

As this is a new blog and I’ve primarily focused my efforts on a small group of people thus far, the obvious choice was William Christopher Chappell, my husband’s 2xgreat-grandfather. I have a fair amount of information about him and he had an interesting life which makes for a much more interesting timeline.

I couldn’t figure out how to create a timeline in Reunion (my genealogy program), even though I do list facts and events. This may simply be inexperience as I don’t play with the built in charts often since we don’t own a printer. Instead, I decided to use Numbers.app to create a spreadsheet. I choose the ‘Schedule’ pre-built spreadsheet and customised it to my purposes.

Timeline for William C Chappell 1869-1941

I’ve omitted most of his Navy information except for promotions, etc., as the list of dates and ships would have been overwhelming in compared to the other information of his life. However, it will be a great way to share his Navy career on the blog in a future post.

I found this process very useful and insightful and it has shown me a few holes where I need to do some further research (mostly on-site research) that I didn’t already have marked in my logs, as well as a few little nuances that I had in documents I already had but haven’t transcribed.

Thanks for the task, Randy! It’s been most valuable. I plan to do similar timelines for other folks up our tree in the future.

For more information and previous posts on William Christopher Chappell, click here, or click on his name under the People tags at the end of this post or on the side bar.