I'm a believer in doing TIME LINES for each individual on your chart. Start a page when you find a record of the birth/baptism and add to it as you discover the birth of siblings, the death of parent's, remarriages and so on. It helps to understand their individual lives.
The timeline begins with Birth and Baptism.
It can include First Holy Communion, or Confirmation, the Conversion to another religion.
It can include Military Service.
Marriage, and the birth of siblings and children that change the size of the family, and their Deaths.
The Remarriages, and thus the Step Parenthood.
Education.
Travel to another country - emigration or immigration. What was their motivation?
Ship records - the name of the ship - what it looked like - what their voyage was probably like.
Naturalization Records - always great to have. If you're just starting your genealogy for Industrial Era Immigration, the World War I draft registration (which included men who were not yet citizens) often has details such as the town or village and country the man left.
You also want to include:
Important times in History they lived through. Locally and in the larger world.
Do some research around these events.
For instance, were your family members involved in any Uprisings or Military Action, any Politics?
Were they refugees? Were they relocated? Did they flee?
Sometimes this is a way of weaving family oral histories into your research and proof the oral histories.
As you add to the timeline, you start to get a feel for your ancestor's life. This is a much richer genealogy for her than charts that seem to only be about a person's direct genetic lines. You may also notice how long they lived, what they died of, and of any genetic patterns emerge.
Earlier I mentioned that if you are Hungarian or Hungarian American, then your ancestors managed to reproduce despite the population being decimated by invaders who killed off much of the population repeatedly. THEY MAY ALSO HAVE BEEN SURVIVORS OF EPIDEMICS!
For instance, in about 1831/1832 I started finding a large number of illegitimate births in a particular small town. Knowing that this was taboo, often resulting in a lowered status at a time when status was important and the way communities were organized, and also often resulted in higher rates of death for the children of a single mother, I wondered what had happened? Had the women been raped? Of course I can't know if they were or not - maybe I tripped across a town where people took to the woods and had an orgy - but then I learned that about this time CHOLERA was making its way through Europe and it was so frightening that a person could take ill suddenly in the morning and be dead by afternoon, having been perfectly healthy. Their vomiting was so intense that victims turned blue and then they dehydrated seriously causing organ failure. My suspicion is that there was so much death, so many graves being dug and so many funerals, all the while not knowing if you were next, so much fear, that many people responded to an instinct for life and had sex.
By the way, the tradition in Hungary is that BAPTISMALS and FUNERALS were for immediate family but WEDDINGS were for the village.
HISTORY CHANNEL ON CHOLERA PANDEMICS.
How did your family make it through the SPANISH FLU PANDEMIC of 1918, which took about 500 million people to death, more than died in World War I?
SMITHSONIAN - HOW THE SPANISH FLU WENT AROUND THE WORLD
EXCERPT: The toll of history's worst epidemic surpasses all the military deaths in World War I and World War II combined. And it may have begun in the United States.
I read this on one site: The Great Plague of 1738 was an outbreak of the BUBONIC PLAGUE between 1738- 1740 that affected areas in the modern nations of Romania, Hungary, Ukraine, Serbia, Croatia, and Austria. On another, particular to Great Britain and Plague, well it turns out that decimation of populations actually relaxed class barriers to marriage.
Include the Pandemics on your timeline even if your ancestor lived through them!
Also of great interest to me as we face climate change is 1816 THE YEAR WITHOUT A SUMMER. The sun didn't make it through thick volcanic ash clouds around the world (including the United States) and there was crop failures, starvation, people moving to warmer locations. The people did not understand what was happening and some took it to be End Times. FARMERS ALMANAC 1816 YEAR WITHOUT SUN
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