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How do I Create a Personal Timeline of Human History?
- 1). Learn about your ancestors. Each person has a different story about how they ended up on Earth. One person might come from a line of royalty, while the other had ancestors who were slaves. This saga telling the story of a person's family will dictate how a timeline of human history is written. If your family has faced difficult circumstances, you might focus more on events where a minority of people overcame difficult odds to gain freedoms and rights. Coming from a more powerful family, you might look to define the important events that kept your family in power.
- 2). Determine significant events when your ancestors were challenged or had successes. Each person alive today had ancestors that were able to persevere and survive long enough to produce a new generation of children leading up to present day. Along the way, each generation faced different road blocks or were given new opportunities. Learn where your ancestors lived and when they emigrated to your home country. Find out why your country was a good place for them to live.
- 3). Refer to history books, primary documents and relatives. Sometimes historians document the past best, but other times personal family stories inform us about what happened most personally. While a group of people may have been exiled to a new location, your family might have worked out a deal to avoid exile. Learn about special family stories that were a significant part of history. During Prohibition, your family might have secretly produced alcohol or your great-grandfather might have helped a famous athlete get his start. These stories will shape your timeline of human history.
- 4). Write out dates, years and short descriptions of each event. You can design the timeline in different formats. A list of dates in chronological order will allow a reader to easily scan through your timeline. A line with dates plotted along it will help visual thinkers see when significant events happened in human history, according to your interpretation. You could also take a world map and plot the significant event in each location. You could also draw pictures of how you envision each event to have looked in the past for a more artistic project.
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