Create a Family Timeline for Photo Organizing
Creating a family timeline can be a great tool when organizing your family’s photo collection.
You may think, of course, I know when my kids were born and when my spouse and I got married and I’m not really interested in family history so why would I need a timeline?
I’ll tell you why. When trying to organize 1000s or 10s of 1000s of photos, your brain is already working overtime. Making a timeline can help give your brain a break.
Making A Timeline
What should you include in your family timeline?
A good starting point is the basics of births, deaths, and marriage. You can also record graduations, moves to new homes, big vacations, new jobs, and any event that might help you date and identify your photos.
It may even be helpful for you to record when which child was in which grade or when they got braces or had that crazy blue hairstyle. Any little thing that you can think of could be helpful.
But don’t be worried about capturing everything for every person in your extended family. Talk about overwhelming!
A Family Timeline as Historical Document
Not only does the timeline help you with your photos, but it can also become a family history document.
After my grandmother’s death, I found a handwritten family timeline she had created. Over the years, she had recorded births, deaths, moves, and jobs. Not only was it a great help when dating some of her older photos, but it was also extra special because it was in her handwriting, which I remember well. What a treasure!
Following in the steps of my grandmother a couple of years ago, my mother and I created our own family timeline, including our annual vacations and family reunions. I can’t tell you how many times we’ve referred to it since we made it. It’s great not to have to rely on your own memory.
Create your Family Timeline However You’d Like
Don’t worry about any fancy programs or spreadsheets. While you can go that route, sometimes just grabbing a pad of paper and starting to brain dump all your family events onto the paper is a great place to start. It’s as easy as that!
Have you created a family timeline for your family?
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Such a straight forward scaffolding to help us organize our photos in a meaningful way.
This is a wonderful idea! I wish my parents and/or grandparents had written down when they lived at various addresses – it would help figure out the timeline for a few of the old photos!
I love this idea, Andi! This certainly is a great way to start organizing your photos and avoid getting overwhelmed!
This post is fascinating. A family timeline is what my mother did for all the trips we took. She wrote down the month and year and where we went spanning over 20+ years. When I have a photo that was not titled, I could look at this list of trips to see if they related to how old I was in the image. It helped me determine when the image was taken.
This is one of my “If you do nothing else” photo organizing tips in my book, “What’s a Photo Without the Story? How to Create Your Family Legacy”! But you’ve gone into more detail here, which is very helpful, thanks!
What a terrific idea! There are so many times when me and my husband are racking our brains trying to remember, “When did we go to…?” or “How many years have we lived in our house?” But having a handy document that puts some basics down would be useful for that times and also for the future.
I remembering doing a very abbreviated version of what you suggested (births, deaths, marriages, significant vacations) when I worked on a photo organizing project for a client. It was useful to get undated photos in the correct year or decade.
This is great guidance and I will absolutely point my clients toward it. It’s a stellar way for families with a rich and robust history to track their happenings.
For me, it’s a little harder (or perhaps easier), as my family is tiny (just three of us), and I’m the only one who has taken any photos in 40 years. (I’m the end of the family tree.) Before I was born, there’s only a smattering of rare snapshots; after, it’s all from the 1960s and 1970s, and nothing changes from year to year except for my mom’s hairstyles and my height: me on Halloween, everyone on Thanksgiving and Hanukkah, me on my birthday, and we literally never went anywhere except to my grandmother’s house in Florida, so those photos are the same from year-to-year, sitting in the same places! Now, we’re sitting in the same places at my sister’s house! 😉 Luckily, they didn’t stop printing the dates on the back of prints until after I went to college, so it’s very easy to tell what happened when! However, for people with lots of relatives and rich tapestries of family history, this provides a way to pass down memories. Thanks for this great guidance!
This is a wonderful and practical solution! I love thinking of the timeline as a historical document. Sharing!
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