Compare Timelines

Time to Compare Timelines

Never look at a timeline for one person in your family tree in isolation. Consider how it might fit in with the timelines of the person's relatives, including those outside his or her immediate family, such as uncles, aunts and cousins. You may not find a trace of the person you're focusing on beyond a certain date, but other relatives may also seem to vanish from the scene at about the same time. Seeing who "disappears" and who doesn't at any particular moment is often a clue in itself. Did relatives with the same occupation vanish at once? Might they have travelled to another state or country together to look for work? Could relatives be sharing a residence in a new location? Could they all be staying with another relative elsewhere for some reason? Try to apply questions like these to related groups who have "gone missing." You'll open your mind to new possibilities and might be able to locate a bunch of kin in the process.

Thanks to Sue Lisk, Your Genealogy Today and Internet Genealogy author


Cheers,
Pat