Military timelines can help with family history.

All of us will have some military history connected to someone in our tree but sometimes it can be difficult to work out just what exactly they were involved in.

Timelines can be excellent tools for giving a quick insight before getting bogged down in the detail

• • Was it the first or second Boer War or was it Afghanistan? Even when we get the right war, without some help it is often difficult to pin down the battle, let alone get into the detail.
  • Timelines can often offer a simple clear way to get the dates and chronology of events right. It’s often a case of, well if he was here then he can’t have been fighting there at the same time.

Sometimes family stories can leave a muddle of who fought where and when. Once on a visit to a military archive, I was told, that they collected both oral and written memories but alas time and collective memory often led to claims of having been in more than one place at a time. It therefore pays to sort out the chronology in the first place.

There are some great military timelines to explore, here are just some we have discovered and hope they are of use;

Battle of Gallipoli, this is a particularly useful site as it gives a day by day chronology of the Anzacs but compare it to the timeline from the Turkish view point and see how the dates check out

Good Boer War timelines are a bit thin on the ground but try the link for a timeline with plenty of detail but has to be downloaded as a pdf

The 1st/2nd Afghan Wars can be a bit tricky to sort out but these timelines should give you the structure of the wars. 1st Afghan 1838 -1842 and 2nd Afghan 1878 – 1880

For the Crimean War try the Florence Nightingale Crimean timeline

The brilliant site the Long Long Trail covers many chronologies for individual battles and regiments for WWI

This will give a good idea of how useful military timelines can be and we will be adding to them in our directories but will do an individual post when we find one that will be particularly helpful to the family historian.