his is an update on my 2020 article evaluating timeline software for writers and family historians.

Timelines are visualization tools which can stimulate creativity and help you make your stories both more compelling and more accurate. Unfortunately, the vast majority of timeline creation tools focus on project management.

Writers and historians need specialized features for storytelling and genealogical research. This guide compares the best timeline software options for both creative writing and family history documentation. These options also offer tools for managing projects and deadlines.

How Timeline Software for Writers Help with Storytelling

For any nonfiction writer, timelines place your story in the context of historical and other family events.

They reveal relationships between events. Timelines help check the sequence of events and help you identify missing context or events you still need to consider or research. This graphical representation helps you walk in your character’s (ancestor’s) shoes and makes you a better researcher and writer.

For instance, when you’re able to compare multiple family members’ timelines, the fact that Aunt Mary was class valedictorian but didn’t go to college like her three brothers jumps out. Being a good researcher and storyteller, you pick at that thread to see if there’s a backstory which adds context to Aunt Mary’s life. You wonder if it’s related to the fact that both her sons hold advanced degrees.

I discovered this while trying to wrap my head around any relationship between Waverly Abbey and my More ancestor’s nearby estate of Losely Park. The more I read, the more muddled things got. Until I put ancestor events on a timeline with historical, religious, political, and family events, I couldn’t even think about writing their stories.

A graphical view of world, local, and family events in helped me understand my ancestors’ world. The better we understand family members, the better we can depict them in stories.

Types of Timeline Software for Writers and Family Historians

You can improve your writing using both ready-made timelines and ones you create yourself.

Timeline Generators

Back in 2020, I recommended Twile.com. Sadly, it’s no longer available.

FamilySearch.org’s Timeline View

FamilySearch.org will display a timeline for individuals in their collaborative family tree. After clicking on the “Person” view of an ancestor, click on the word “Timeline,” currently located on the far left.

Below you can see the display that Family Search generates for my grandfather.

Timeline view of a person in FamilySearch’s collaborative tree.

The accompanying map could be helpful for ancestors who moved around a lot. Though you can turn it off, you’re still limited to the scrolling strip with graphics. I hope FamilySearch updates this to allow you to make the timeline full screen or in a print mode, similar to the 2020 screen shot (below).

 

 

OurTimelines.com’s Timeline of Events

OurTimeLines.com will generate a list of historical events, scientific discoveries to date ranges you give it. It accepts ranges between 5 and 140 years.

If you give a person’s name to the timeline, OurTimeLines will calculate the person’s age at the time of the invention, as you can see in the screen shot below.

Although the output looks chunky, it’s simple to copy and past items into a word and eliminate the events that wouldn’t have impacted your character or ancestor as much. The inclusion of inventions gives readers points of reference. For instance, if you realize your grandfather’s burst appendix happened before the advent of antibiotics, you can increase readers’ sense of tension.

My grandfather grew up on a farm and had a super compassionate nature, so I think the Dust Bowl would have caused him great concern. Naturally, living through the Great Depression shortly before that was also part of his context, but he knew what it was like to be poor way before the stock market crashed.

The Best DIY Timeline Software for Writing and Family Storytelling: Preceden vs Aeon

Both Preceden and Aeon Timeline 2  have great features for writers. They both have intuitive drag-and-drop interfaces. You can color code events, include a single day event or a time range (such as the reign of a monarch), and “dependencies” (the ability to make events start when another event ends).  Both allow you to add images.

Note: Pricing shown reflects pricing on the vendors’ respective websites at the time of publication.

Preceden Timeline Maker

Preceden, a browser-based Freemium platform, has three plans: Free Forever, Basic, and Pro.

I used Preceden’s free plan to create a timeline of family and historical events that occurred during my grandmother’s first 20 years.

Like all Freemium apps, the more you pay, the more features you unlock. Because I used the Free plan, I was limited to 10 events, but you can see the vivid colors and icons Preceden offers.

The “Free Forever” plan allows you to

• Create unlimited timelines
• Add 10 events per timeline
• Export your timelines to pdf, pptx, and more

The “Basic” plan costs $10/month billed annually and offers

• Unlimited timelines with unlimited events
• Removal of Preceden branding from your exported timelines
• Event import from a spreadsheet

The “Pro” plan goes for $16/month billed annually and offers the following additional features:

• Collaborating with others
• Adding a custom logo
• Setting up a custom domain

Preceden scores high on export options and makes creating a legend for your timeline a snap. They boast “No download required.” The flip side is that you can’t use the program without internet access.

Some additional highlights of Preceden include:

• Approximate date feature, which uses faded edges on event bars to represent uncertainty in start or end dates
• Wide range of icons
• Simple legend creation (You can see an example embedded at the bottom right of the timeline above)

Aeon Timeline

Aeon Timeline is a software (as opposed to a subscription). It’s designed for writers to help plan, write, and edit stories. In 2020, I used version 2, but recently upgraded to version 3, which I am using in this review.

To study my More ancestors, I used the following colors to help me categorize events.

This allowed me to isolate which events happened to which ancestors and to separate the craziness that was Henry VIII from other historical events.

 

Aeon offers a 14-day trial, with full functionality. This is a great way to see if Aeon Timeline will meet your needs. A $65 license includes one year of updates and has desktop apps for Windows and Mac (IOS). You can install it on five devices. In addition, Aeon offers volume and academic pricing. They offer a $25 discount for upgrading from version 2.

My only regret with upgrading is I wish I’d done it sooner. Here are a few things not listed above that are terrific for writers and family historians.

• No limits. With Freemium plans, you’re always coming up against a limit unless you upgrade
• Ability to add sources to events
• Narrative view, which lets writers drag-and-drop events from the timeline into a non-linear narrative sequence, helping to structure the story as it will be told rather than just chronologically
• Customizable categories, tags, and properties
• Relationship View with lets writers see connections between characters, events, and locations

The two most valuable features for family history writers:

• A family history template (!)
• Historical event integration: writers can insert real-life historic events alongside their fictional plot points

Aeon Timeline Syncs with Scrivener and Ulysses Writing Apps

If you use Scrivener (See Review: Using Scrivener for Family History and Memoir Writing) or Ulysses, Aeon can help you figure out your timeline of events. As shown in the screenshot of a fiction project below, Aeon can sync a timeline with a Scrivener project so you can assign a date or date range to each entry in your manuscript.

 

I’m just now exploring all the features that I can add to my timelines, including location, character(s), tension, synopsis, and story arc information to events.

 

Timeline Software Comparison: Aeon vs Preceden

Core Features

Feature	Aeon Timeline 3	Preceden Free	Preceden Basic	Preceden Pro
Price	$65 one-time*	Free	$10/month**	$16/month**
Platform	Desktop (Windows/Mac)	Web-based	Web-based	Web-based
Internet Required	No	Yes	Yes	Yes
Number of Timelines	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited	Unlimited
Events per Timeline	Unlimited	10	Unlimited	Unlimited

Writing-Specific Features

Feature	Aeon Timeline 3	Preceden Free	Preceden Basic	Preceden Pro
Scrivener Integration	✓	–	–	–
Family History Template	✓	–	–	–
Narrative View	✓	–	–	–
Character/Location Relationships	✓	–	–	–
Source Citations	✓	–	–	–

Visualization

Feature	Aeon Timeline 3	Preceden Free	Preceden Basic	Preceden Pro
Color Coding	✓	✓	✓	✓
Custom Icons	✓	Limited	✓	✓

Other Features

Feature	Aeon Timeline 3	Preceden Free	Preceden Basic	Preceden Pro
Multi-device Install	5 devices	N/A	N/A	N/A
Team Collaboration	–	–	–	✓
Spreadsheet Import	✓	–	✓	✓
Custom Domain	–	–	–	✓

*Includes one year of updates
**Billed annually
Note: ✓ = Feature available, – = Feature not available

Another Timeline for Writing Option: Timeline JS

Knightlab’s timeline, Timeline JS,  allows you to build a timeline via a Google sheet template.

As World History Commons explains, Timeline JS “combines two main elements: a slide deck at the top that displays text and other media that describes events included on a timeline below.”

Though free, I found it to be quite complicated and limited, but that could be the learning curve. In fact, I gave up after creating my spreadsheet of events. For that reason, I would recommend Preceden and Aeon Timeline over Timeline JS outside of educational applications.

Your turn

Do you use timeline programs to develop stories and context? Are you ready to try one? Please share your timeline experiences in the comment section below.

You can begin by trying Preceden’s free plan to experiment with basic timeline creation or downloading Aeon Timeline’s 14-day trial for more advanced features. Check out FamilySearch or OurTimelines.com find additional events to add for context.

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