My husband looked over my shoulder once at the fingerprints of my great grandfather on his military records. It showed one of his index fingers amputated close to the first knuckle. I wondered aloud how that came about.
“Well,” asked my husband, “what did he do for a living?”
“Duh,” I had to reply, “he was a butcher.”

2010 March 31

with a tab between each element. I usually only use the year at the beginning of a year’s events, and the month at the beginning of a month’s events, so that I can run my eye down and easily pick out where a new time period begins. Then I tab again and type out a simple description of the event. When I have new events to enter, I enter a couple of returns in the correct place — i.e., I sort manually rather than having the computer do that — and type the new event in its correct place. I wish I could paste in a sample, but it wouldn’t look right in the blogging software, which doesn’t allow for tabbed columns.

I think a word processor works better than a spreadsheet because the length of my description of the event might be just a few words, or run for several lines. Also, I type my chronology at the beginning of the same file where I type transcriptions of all the documents I’ve found pertaining to that family. (I virtually never use the citation apparatus in a genealogy database, for instance, because I have the full text of all my data — and I’m starting now to plug in digital images since that has become so easy — in a documentation file in WordPerfect. Any word processing software has features that make entering that kind of data much easier than any genealogy database program, IMO.)

But if you’re very comfortable with a spreadsheet or database program, either would work well. I’d suggest simply picking whatever tool you’re most comfortable with, that displays your information in a format that is pleasing to you. This is one of those tools that is intended to serve YOU, not another way to make you serve the needs of the computer.

I’ll email you a sample of one of my chronologies if you like.

http://lib.byu.edu/mormonmigration/index.php

I asked Ardis for a bit of help when I was helping Mom edit one chapter where Cornelius Lott, one of our cousins, went off with the Mormons. (He, by the way, was captain of the company Mary Fielding travelled in, and it was he who was humbled when she whom he had belittled beat him to the valley.) His story is the only point of contact our family had with the church prior to me, and I was glad she included it.

It has been a wonderful gift to get to know these men and women, often led by their faith, who went through major trials and personal triumphs and tragedies to build our present world.