Family History Detective by Desmond Walls Allen

Author:Desmond Walls Allen [Allen, Desmond Walls]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-1-440-31691-3
Publisher: F+W Media
Published: 2011-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

* * *

Who were your ancestors who might have served in America’s wars? Right off, it may be a bit difficult to correlate dates of events with your ancestors’ lives. Sometimes your brain needs a little help organizing information. If you create a diagram, it may help you see things a bit differently. Try the following technique and see if it works for you. If it helps clarify your thinking about your potential-soldier ancestors, apply it to other subjects.

Remember in school when you had to make a timeline for some history assignment? Let’s try it again. Tape some sheets of paper together, end to end, and draw a heavy line horizontally down the middle of them. Use a ruler and establish a scale. You might make one inch equal five years. Label the right end of the heavy line “the present.” Mark the line off in increments and label them to suit your scale. Mark the decades on the heavy line—1990, 1980, 1970, and so on, backward in time for a couple of centuries. Then, above the heavy line, label the major U.S. wars on your timeline, working back to the Revolutionary War.

Underneath the heavy line and parallel to it, draw another line representing your life. Begin the line at the year of your birth and draw it parallel to the heavy line on which you marked the dates. Drop down just a bit and do the same for your father’s life span. If he’s living, extend the line to the present, starting it at his birth year. Do the same for your grandfathers. And for your four great-grandfathers. Consult the family group sheets and pedigree chart you’ve compiled. You may not know the exact birth and death dates of all these men, so make an educated guess if you must, for now. Leave off your ancestors who never came to America. You’ll have to consider their participation in wars in their native countries.

War or Conflict Dates

Vietnam 1954–1975

Korea 1950–1953

World War II 1939–1945

World War I 1914–1918

Spanish-American War 1898–1899

Civil War 1861–1865

Mexican War 1846–1848

War of 1812 1812–1815

Revolutionary War 1776–1783

You’ve been drawing parallel lines so far, the heavy one representing the continuum of time and others representing the years of your male ancestor’s lives. (We’re just doing the guys in this exercise because soldiers were primarily male, especially in historic times.) Now use a highlighter or marker and draw a sweep of color vertically through the heavy line where you’ve marked off the war time periods, on through your ancestors’ lines. Your object is to highlight the time periods in their lives when the wars occurred. Now compute their ages at the time of the wars from your heavy line. Some will have been children or older men during wartime. Any of the men who fall within possible military age on your timeline may have served in the military.

There’s free software on the Internet to create timelines. Do a search for “Timeline creation free software.” Timelines are fairly straightforward creations, however, and you can do it without computer assistance.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.