Timelines are one of easiest ways to organize your research to help you understand what you have and where you're going. I often preach about how useful timelines are for capturing your research and organizing it to help you get a big picture of your ancestor’s life and the world around them. They are essential in organizing your research and finding gaps in your research; they are also a handy tool for writing your family history stories. Using them as a means to identify the story you want to write.
But timelines are also fantastic tools for sharing your stories. They are not just a tool to a larger means they are an excellent way to engage your family in their family history. If you’re not up to writing or producing a big family history book, consider creating a timeline video to share your family history stories.
In this day of technology books are not our only options for sharing our research and stories. There are so many wonderful new options for creating multimedia timelines that can share pictures, documents and narratives with your family. Timelines can be engaging and entertaining and with an appeal to all ages.
I’ve sourced out seven wonderful timeline apps that you can investigate as a means to sharing your family history stories. I won’t tell you which one is the best. This is for you to decide. Look for a timeline that you find easy to manage, with an interface that works with your level of knowledge. Some are free, some require a subscription fee, some will have limited features until you subscribe. You’ll have to weigh out what you are trying to accomplish. Sometimes a small fee goes a long way to adding features that can beef up the look and feel of your timelines.
Most of these websites also offer the ability for you to embed your timeline into your site, blog or Facebook page. Go ahead check them out, maybe creating a timeline of your family history is just the alternative you need to preserve and share your family history.
1. Capzles – create a multimedia presentation with videos, music, pictures, blogs and documents.
2. Time Toast – Timetoast is an online app where you can create historical timelines of important events.
3. Our Timelines – This one is free and built by someone with a genealogy background but is limited in its capabilities. But it’s free, did I mention that.
4. Timeglider – This is a pay to play timeline app but affordable at $5 a month or $50 for a year.
5. Twile – This app was built with the family historian in mind. There are three levels, free, premium and family, allowing you to collaborate with others. Again quite affordable at $50 a year, and you can upload your Gedcom file for that price. That’s pretty sweet!
6. Treelines – is another timeline app designed with the family historian in mind. Again it gives you the ability to create collaborative family history stories. It also allows you to upload your Gedcom file. Treelines is probably my favourite of the free timeline apps designed for family historians.
7. everyStory – everyStory isn’t so much a timeline app as it is a storytelling app for your pictures. It allows you to post pictures and add your voice telling a story to go with the pictures. Your story is safely stored in the cloud and can be shared with family and friends. It looks like everyStory was built on some of the technology developed by the former Storypress.
