A timeline chart draws each person as a horizontal line spanning the years they lived, placed on a shared time axis — inspired by Joseph Priestley’s 1765 Chart of Biography. The chart reads as "who lived when" at a glance: contemporaries sit above one another, long and short lives are immediately comparable, and vertical linker lines mark the moment each child was born on their parent’s timeline, so parentage can be traced on the same canvas.
Where a person’s birth or death is not recorded, the line fades out past the last firm anchor rather than stopping at a hard end, so uncertainty is visible rather than invented.
A strip of wider-world history bands runs along the bottom of the chart — monarchs, major wars, style eras and economic ages (British history in this release) — so family lifespans can be pinned against the events their subjects lived through.
Click New Chart on the Charts tab and select "Timeline Chart". You will be prompted to choose the starting person.
You can also switch any existing chart by setting Mode to "timeline" on the General tab of the Chart Properties panel.
For timeline charts, the Strategy choice appears on the General tab in place of the Detail choice (timelines show names only, so the detail level does not apply). Three strategies are available, and all of them respect the Generations setting:
| Strategy | Who appears |
|---|---|
| All ancestors | Every ancestor of the starting person, with each person’s father placed above them and mother below |
| Manual ancestors | The same ancestor walk, but honouring per-person stops |
| Manual descendants | The starting person’s descendants, honouring per-person stops and the Direct to target |
Set a Stop at me flag on an ancestor (see Constraining who appears) and the chart will include that ancestor but climb no further up their line. Choose Ignore to omit the ancestor and everyone beyond them. This is useful for pruning a well-researched line so a less-known branch has room to breathe.
Rows are ordered by birth year, oldest at the top, so the family cascades down the page through time. A Stop at me flag on a person includes them but none of their descendants, and Ignore omits the person and their whole branch.
Setting a Direct to target (see Direct line) reduces the chart to just the people on the direct path between the starting person and the target — a direct line drawn as lifespans down the centuries, which makes a striking alternative to the conventional direct line chart.