Make a life story timeline from photos and letters
Lay out a parent's life, a childhood or a year you want to keep: photos, letters and documents in the order they happened, decade by decade, with what the world was doing alongside. The timeline below follows a pregnancy week by week, counted from the first day of the last period instead of a calendar date.
The photos and letters themselves
Attach the evidence itself to the moment it belongs to: photographs, scanned letters, recordings and documents, each with a caption.
- Star a photo to show it on the timeline.
- Play audio and video, and read PDFs, without leaving the item.
- Record a voice memo right in the browser: a grandparent telling the story in their own voice.
Pro & TeamAudio, video, PDFs and voice memos come with Pro and Team. Photos come with every plan.
Dates the way you remember them
Few memories come with a day. Write "summer 1974" or "around 1962", and the timeline keeps exactly what you know, whether that is a day, a season or a decade.
- Leave out what you don't know: a year without a month, a month without a day.
- Add a ± where a date is only roughly known, and the edge of its bar softens on the axis.
- Count from a day of your own, such as a birth or a wedding, and every date reads from it: week 20, year 3.
Letters and documents as sources
Add a letter, a certificate or a conversation to your source library once, and cite it from every item it supports.
- Books, articles, archives, web pages and media, each with the right fields.
- Add a source once, cite it from as many items as you like.
- Give the timeline assistant a photo of a diary page or a scanned letter and it drafts the events it finds, each with the quote it rests on. Nothing is added until you have reviewed it.
What the world was doing
Lay a public timeline beneath a life and read it against the decades around it: what the world was doing while your grandmother grew up.
- Add up to three timelines beneath yours: your own, shared ones, or public ones.
- Drag or zoom once and every strip moves with it.
- The set lives in the link, so whoever you send it to sees the same view.
A booklet for the family
Turn the story into a PDF to print and give, or a Word file to keep writing in: a title page, then every item in date order with its photos, notes and sources.
- Choose what goes in, from a full booklet to a compact list of items.
- On A4 or US Letter, in any of six languages.
- As a Word file, the sources come through as notes that renumber as you edit.
Pro & TeamExporting a booklet comes with Pro and Team, and also when you edit a timeline whose owner has one.
Coming from a photo album or a document?
A photo album or a folder of scans keeps everything and the order of nothing. Put each photo and letter on the date it belongs to, and the story lines up.
A document of memories reads well once, but a date you are unsure of has to be guessed. Here it can say "around 1962" and still sit in the right place.
A notebook keeps the facts but loses where each came from. Here a citation sits under the item it supports.
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See a story counted from its first day
Pregnancy week by week is counted from the first day of the last period, with an item for each week.
Open Pregnancy week by week