# 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 & Team** Audio, 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.

[How it works](https://timescrolly.com/help/dates)

## 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.

[How it works](https://timescrolly.com/help/context-timelines)

## 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 & Team** Exporting a booklet comes with Pro and Team, and also when you edit a timeline whose owner has one.

[How it works](https://timescrolly.com/help/printing-and-images)

## 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.

[Open Pregnancy week by week](https://timescrolly.com/t/timescrolly/pregnancy-week-by-week)