#31: From Beginning to End: Using Timelines to Chronicle Your Past

Join us as we weave through the fabric of our own stories, threading together the moments that define us with the art of timeline creation. Step into a world where each second tells a story, and learn how to etch your personal history or honor the journey of an ancestor with innovative and structured methods that breathe life into memories.

From the intimate 'day in the life' timelines that capture the essence of special occasions to the comprehensive life story timelines that chart the course from birth to the present, this episode gifts you the tools to leave a legacy as unique as the names and anecdotes behind it.

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Transcript

Melissa: 0:01

Welcome to the Preserve your Past podcast, where we'll explore all things related to the creative process of writing your stories for future generations. I'm your host, melissa Ann Kitchum, author, teacher, speaker and coach. I believe that your personal history is a priceless gift for family, friends and generations to come, whether you consider yourself a writer or not. We are discussing the topics that help you with every step of the process, like how to mine for the juiciest story ideas or how to refine them into polished final drafts you'll be proud to share. Let's face it sure, your stories can be overwhelming, but I've got you covered. We all have a lifetime of memories to share, so why not save yours to pass along? Let me help you leave your lasting legacy.

Speaker 2: 1:05

Hi everybody and welcome back to the Preserve your Past podcast. This is Melissa, your host, and, as I mentioned, today we are going to be looking at five simple timelines that you can use to create and organize your memories, as well as specific information that you can include with those timelines to make them more fun and more interesting. So we're going to go through five different timelines that can be used to organize your stories or stories of loved ones, or even historic, like ancestors and stories, and after I go through the timelines, I'm going to be talking about even the information that you can use to organize the information on each plot point. So, again, a timeline is a graphic display that we can use to show events in a chronological order, starting from left to right, and you've probably seen them when you were growing up in school in history or looking at famous people and thinking even about things and how they happen to you. I know you can see that we have a line that goes horizontally and we often put out plot points from left to right and think about what happened first, what happened second, you know all the way through to the end. Now, when you're making your timelines, it doesn't have to be in that chronological order that you actually are putting them onto the timeline. You could decide that you're going to put your first point, your last point and then, as you remember, what you want to include on that timeline that could then be added to your. Those points could be added to your timeline. So let's look at five simple timelines that you can use to organize your information when you are writing your stories, or even, instead of a story, how could you use this as a graphic representation of those memories?

Speaker 2: 3:16

So the first timeline sample would be a life story timeline. This is probably the first thing that came to mind when I mentioned a timeline. So the life story timeline could be ours, our children's, the timeline of our parent, a grandparent or another relative and even a pet. You could do their timeline. How you would do that is draw the line, like I mentioned, across the page and then put on your plot points of major events that happen throughout that person's life or throughout your life, some things that commonly could go on.

Speaker 2: 3:54

A life story timeline could be the story behind a person's name. Now I talk about in my book Bridging your Past and your Future, about my name story and how, and I call it like a legend. I wasn't there when this was happening. I didn't witness the story, but it was almost like one of those legends that gets passed down to you. In the book I talk about how my parents shared with me that my name was originally going to be Heather. They were thinking that was it for a while and then when I was born, I ended up being nine pounds 13 ounces and apparently did not look light enough to be Heather. I think another name they were looking at was Faith and instead I became Melissa, which apparently was a sturdier name. That's funny. But you probably have stories behind your name. That's even like not even talking timeline stories. That could be its own story, thinking about left to right. So the story behind your name, the story behind your birth, is there something that happened?

Speaker 2: 5:07

As we're thinking about those points, school age stories maybe you want to go grade by grade by grade and put in the teacher you had or your friends that you had, then a lesson learned or something that you remember from that year in school. That could then go to bullet points on your timeline or I shouldn't say bullet points, but plot points on your timeline that could go through your early teens or high school days. Those high school ones could then be specific activities or friends or lessons. You could go into college or young adulthood and look at what were your goals then, what were your feelings then, like what were you witnessing? And write down those events that maybe were big events during that time, or maybe college is the event point and there's maybe bullets and things under that to describe that time. Then we could go into early adulthood, when you're doing your first house, your first apartment if you're married or starting a family, like when did that happen, how did that happen? And then go into adulthood and on the struggles, the celebrations, the lessons learned. So thinking about it from the beginning to the end, putting on those plot points, and then thinking about the stories that go along with those plot points. Then, as I mentioned, you don't need to put them down out of your head in order, because if you know where they fall on that timeline, you could start with the beginning end and then fill in the middle Another way to use a timeline in stories.

Speaker 2: 6:49

So number two would be a day in the life timeline. So now we're not looking at a whole person's life, now we're looking at just one day and again we're doing the line across. We have morning, we have evening and we're looking at the whole thing. So now we're saying here is how we could demonstrate either a special day so maybe you're going to tell about your wedding day and you're going to do a day in the life when I got married and start, for example, waking up and what did you do to get ready? I can think about my morning and my wedding day and my friend Linda coming to do my hair, and I can think about how we were all staying at the same hotel and then my uncle driving me to the event, the location where we were having it, and then I can go through the whole day, even to the end where we stayed at. We went back to my in-laws, but then how we drove to stay at a special cottage that was owned by the family near the water. So I have those times of that day in my life that I can remember and probably putting it down sooner than later, because it was a long time ago.

Speaker 2: 8:02

It's going to be 30 years coming up in June, so some of those important days in your life are good to do closer to when they happen, but again, this could be a special day. It could be an average day. What is an average day look like for you? What would a best day look like? What would a really hard day look like? Take a deeper dive into each of those and while you're doing this, you're again putting the line across from morning to night and just thinking about what you want to share from that point of view of your day in the life Number three. And I'm going to take a sip of water because, as you can tell, I'm having some throat issues and, yes, this is a podcast and you're listening. Hopefully the sound quality is going well, but I am going to pause for a moment and take a sip and this might get edited out, thank you.

Speaker 2: 9:00

So, after the day in the life timeline, we are going to have a Lessons Learned timeline. You who have been listening to me for a while know that's one of my favorite story themes, because I think that there's always a good story behind lessons, right? Whether it's a lesson we learned from someone else or it's a lesson that we learned from something that happened to us. So this timeline could contain maybe even the same as the life story timeline as far as which events you're plotting out, but at each of those events, whether it be school age, what was the lesson learned? Adulthood, what were the lessons learned? You know, older age, what was the lesson learned?

Speaker 2: 9:42

So, thinking about that, it could be again that same format as the life timeline, but you could then organize it by each of those events, then telling a lesson that was learned at that time. This I would ask you to think about when you're writing that who are you going to be sharing this with, so that you can think about your audience and what you want to teach them and show them and really delve into those lessons. And then, what do you want for them to take away from the lessons? And that will help you when you're actually plotting out some more meat into each of the lessons that you learned along the way. And I always talk about, when you start your stories, thinking, getting grounded, thinking of your topics, but also remembering to think about your audience. So that was number three, a lesson learned timeline.

Speaker 2: 10:39

And the timeline number four is an observational timeline. Now, this means you are going to do that horizontal line and you are going to do beginning, middle and type events, but this is going to be from your observing a loved one. So it could be a gift for a child. It could be a grandchild, a sibling, a parent. You're looking at their timeline and the idea is to share the things you've noticed, that you've witnessed, that you've respected, honored, or things that you're proud of. Maybe there are times that you saw them persevere, or you saw them struggle and overcome something, or struggle and not overcome it, but you honored the pain that they went through. It might be times of celebration but in the end the purpose is to show that person your love, your support and your honor that you've seen, as you've watched them go through their life, and so that observational or honoring timeline is your observation, your lens that you've seen them go through. Maybe even it's only part of their life, but it's something that you can use to acknowledge another person and it's a really neat way to show them your love and support.

Speaker 2: 12:04

I think, especially as we have our children go through childhood, young adulthood, into adulthood, it's nice to write those observations and show them that we saw them struggle and overcome. Or it's amazing gift to give our parents as we go back and look through the things that happened in our life and maybe observed in our lives and maybe observe the way they did things and how we learned from it. So that's the fourth way of using a timeline in your stories or with your memories, and the fifth way is a historic or ancestor timeline. Now, in this one, you're choosing someone from your past, you're choosing someone that you've researched or you can research, and so we're thinking ancestor, we're thinking someone in the past that you are like, maybe doing genealogical research on or something like that, and you're organizing your research into this timeline format. So again, the line goes across we're putting our bullets in and you're using your findings and your data and your major life events and you're plugging those along on that timeline from left to right in order of how they happened. And the purpose of this one is to show, like your research, in a way that others can clearly observe a person's life from beginning to end.

Speaker 2: 13:36

When you're doing this, I encourage you to be specific, with exact dates, with specific locations and even citing sources for your information. This came up in one of my former podcasts and we had talked about. It was with Cindy Bersaed-Tarian and she had talked about when she did her biographies of her many mothers. She was talking about how she always adds in where she gets the information from and sites her sources. And the more specific you can be and the more information you can share on those sources means that people could take that timeline and go back and they might wanna dig further, they might wanna learn more and they might wanna see the original sources or even visit those actual locations.

Speaker 2: 14:30

So, no matter which of these timelines that you choose, I'm also gonna offer some ideas for when you are first writing out those plot points on how you could even make it simple for the information you're gonna share below them, Like the information that's going to build them out from just that main event point. So it might be birth or name story, but then what is the story or what's gonna be able to flesh that out? So we have more information. And I offer these ideas because there's several fun ways that you can do this that don't take a lot of time. Depending on the amount of effort and energy you wanna put into it, you could do something very basic. You could do something more in depth. This could help you take this timeline and make it an actually a bigger project. So I want you to think about a few of these ways that below those plot lines, plot points. This is what you could do.

Speaker 2: 15:32

So maybe the plot point for the first idea is to add bullet points. So maybe the plot point is the name story and instead of writing out a narrative, you're doing bullets of memories or ideas that kind of go along with that, that are very short, like what was the original name bullet, why did they change? It? Could be another bullet, like just different little, keeping it very simple details in bullet format below that event description. Or you could take it and turn it into something a little bit more specific and more narrative and create an actual paragraph that is built around a single sentence or that one plot point and you're adding more details and more meat and more description and bringing that person to that event in a more narrative form. So each plot point is a well-formed, clearly describing the event paragraph.

Speaker 2: 16:34

The next way that you could take that even further, if you are looking at creating something even larger and more detail filled, it could take those paragraphs and you could then even think about it as chapter format. So maybe each plot point is going to be a chapter in a book about this person, whether it's you or whether it was about someone else, and so the chapter would be even more information than the paragraphs. You could take your notes and then, for each plot point, you could turn that into a longer chapter of its own and then put those chapters in order of the timeline and have an actual project or book at the end. Another thing you could do is to start with photos, so making those plot points and putting a photo that matched what was happening at that event. Some people might even have the photos to start with. Put the photos in order and then do either bullet points, paragraphs, chapters however you want to describe those photos to be able to put more information of what's happening in them, or, if you want to just leave them on their own in order so that people could see them Again. Anytime you're preserving your past, whether it's through stories or photographs or other kinds of data or artifacts any information that you can add with specifics and details is always gonna help. A person that's coming back that's gonna maybe be able to ask the questions, because you might not be there for them to get clarification. So, even if you're using just the photos, any kind of description or information or source and whatnot is gonna be helpful.

Speaker 2: 18:18

Another really cool way to do a timeline story is for each of those events, maybe you choose a quote that really captures the meaning of that life event and then you could show and write about how that quote kind of spoke to what was happening at that time. So you could just stop with a quote for each of the events or then you could take it and reflect on it, on how that quote really meant something at that time or captures that time very well. Whichever you choose, okay. Whichever you choose, no matter how simple or how complex you decide to go. So whether you choose those life story timeline or a day in the life, or the lessons learned, or the observational timeline or a historic ancestor timeline, and whether you're just doing bullet points or whether you're turning it into photos or the paragraphs or chapters and quotes, whichever you choose, simple or complex, please remember your purpose when you sit down to write, remember what's the purpose of this and be creative and enjoy the process.

Speaker 2: 19:32

There is so much to be gained, not just from the final project but from what we are doing while we are working on the actual work of preserving the past, because it's not just about the final project, it's also allows us, when we do these types of things, the gift of reflection and appreciation. It allows us to create a narrative around our own stories. It allows us to make meaning of those stories, and so I invite you to take the time to reflect, to work through them and not just get them done, and to remember. The benefits of just putting them together are the same as the benefits of the gifts that you're giving or the stories you're passing along. So if you do try any of these, I would love to hear from you on Facebook with preserving your past with Melissa and Kitchen, or you could share them by emailing me, melissaatmellisaandkitchencom.

Speaker 2: 20:40

Again, please like and share this podcast wherever you listen to podcasts and subscribe so you can be notified every time we have a new episode, which has been coming out now on Tuesdays, so you can look for your next one each Tuesday. But I'd love to hear from you if there is a topic that you're struggling with in your writing. If this is, you're getting stuck at something and you're not able to kind of make it through or get yourself motivated, please share those topics. Again, my email is melissaatmellisaandkitchencom. We would love to do a question and answer episode, whatever you think. If you have a topic you'd love to hear more about, I would love to hear that from you. And again, no matter where you are listening from or how you are working through your stories, remember, here's to writing your powerful personal stories. Wasn't that a fun episode?

Melissa: 21:37

I enjoyed our conversation so much and if you would like to continue our conversation, be sure to follow this podcast and share with friends. This helped share the mission of preserving the past with stories. Want more tips, tools and inspiration? Head over to melissaandkitchencom and, as always, let's get writing your powerful personal stories.