After you have created your Ebook with up to 2400 pages, a page per ancestor, you have those pages to fill! Suddenly Names, Dates and Places just aren't enough! So, how do you fill those pages if you really don't know much about your ancestor? Ancestry.com can help you with that!
It's called Creating Chronologies (or Timelines), and according to Ancestry.com it allows us to "view our ancestor's life in context." You already have the 'bones' for your ancestor, ie. names dates and places; now you just flesh out the faces, muscles and add a wardrobe.
There are 3 important pieces you should add to flesh out your heritage:
- Stories and Photos
- Documents, Certificates of Birth, Marriage, Death. Newspaper articles if you have any.
- Old letters, bills, etc.
For an example I am going to use our Grandmother Dorothy Mattie Hughes, born in the year 1897 in Nebraska. What can we learn about her life as a child? She was born in Gage County, NE, but the family moved to Custer, Kansas soon after; we can tell this because there is a 1900 US Federal Census that states she was 2 years old. Which meant she was probably dressed wearing a pinafore over her dress. Much like this dress and pinafore from magdalenaperks.wordpress.com...
Kansas State Board of Agriculture conducted a Census every 5 years from 1855-1930, & in 1905 Dorothy's family were living in Limestone, Kansas. She was the oldest with 3 little brothers, ages 5, 3 & 1.
By 1910, her family was living in Valley, Smith, Kansas, where her father worked as a farm employee. By this time she had 5 siblings.
We don't have any photos of Grandma Dorothy as a girl, however she talked of living in a 1 room Soddy with her Mom, Dad, Aunt Alice, three brothers and two sisters, and about a nearby neighbor who didn't like sleeping alone, so he would ride the mile to their home each evening and throw his blanket roll on the floor by the door.
This picture matches the stories the family told of life in a Soddy, although this one is from irwinator.com. This page also states that there were approx. a million Soddies in use in Canada and the United States during this time.
Here, if you wish you could tell of how a Soddy was made and why they were so often used. How a well made Soddy had a deeply slanted roof with live grass to shed the rain, and a muslin ceiling to keep dirt and centipedes from falling in the soup.
As a girl, Dorothy was part of the Nebraska Land Run, Her family lived near the Gulf of Texas where ranchers would poison wells to get nesters off the land they thought of as their own.
When Dorothy was 16 years old she met and fell head over heals for George Schnee, Stepson of Thomas Gasvery who married his mother, Ida, after the disappearance of his father about 1905 in Pennsylvania. When George was 17 he worked at the local hardware store in Atchison, Kansas. Atchison is 230 miles East of Valley Township, Kansas and I haven't discovered what brought him into that area.
Dorothy's folks wouldn't allow her to marry until she was 18, which she was in 1916. That year she married her sweetheart in Blocker, Oklahoma.
See how much more interesting this is than:
Dorothy Mattie Hughes: Born ____
Married George Schnee ____
Died ____
This is just a rough draft, it would be even more interesting if I put in comments from people who knew them, Certificates of Marriage, Death, Births, their lives as ShareCroppers in Oregon, etc. When you bring your gedcom file to AncestorEbooks.com, bring along the stories, history of the areas they lived in, the poetry or paintings, etc. Bring your life to your family history!
