Using Genealogical Timelines

How often have you heard about using Timelines in your genealogy research and thought: A timeline? How will that help me? Of what use are they? A timeline of what? I ignored timelines for many years, but started making them when I started to write up my family histories.

Location Timeline
My first timeline was for a place: Brody, Ukraine, or in my family’s time period Brody, Lemberg, Galicia, Austro-Hungarian Empire. Many of my family members come from this location, and during different times in history, it was referred to by different names. This type of timeline helps define when wars and other political changes took place. Here is my timeline for Brody in the time period of my ancestors. It includes ancestral names and spellings, latitude and longitude, as well as the current name. I found this information through Google searches of the name in its various spellings but I always start with Wikipedia because it gives a nice overview and concise history of the location. Wikipedia often has links to other sources that is helpful. I have done timelines for a country, for a district, and for a specific town depending upon what I need to be clear about when writing up a family story. As an example, the following are the notes I have on Brody, including my sources, for the time period I am writing about.