Timeline - Sometimes shows birth of spouse

Most of the timelines for the people I have entered show their own births and the births of their children. The timeline of Mary Foote (1793- ) also shows the birth of her husband, Elijah Boardman. I assume this is a bug. It might be related to the fact that I pulled both their birth dates from the same source (I think this is the only time I did this, so far).

Thanks for pointing this out, @DataAnalyst. We’re looking into it!

Timelines show all events where the person is listed as an event participant. Was Mary listed as one of the people on Elijah’s birth event? That is, if you click on Elijah’s birth event to expand it, do you see Mary in the list of people associated with the event?

Yes. This is not obvious and I think undesirable. The net result is that what shows up on the timeline depends on how you enter sources. For example, I was pulling from a book. I could choose to enter each fact separately with a source for each, or enter quite a lot of related people from one source. My timelines might be quite inconsistent in what they show. Personally, I really object to timelines that show events for all relatives - way too much clutter. I can accept births of children (especially when in a lighter color), but births of spouses, siblings, etc. gets tedious and in the way of finding meaningful info.

I’ve thought about this some more, and I really think this would be a game-changer for me. I have a pretty logical mind, and having timelines inconsistent between different people in my tree would drive me nuts and I would not use the site. When I first encountered the timeline concept in Ancestry Public Member Trees, I hated it because it was so cluttered with facts for siblings, etc. that I could not focus on the person I was looking at. About the only facts for relatives that I think I could handle in a timeline are births of children (because they help you see quickly whether or not they are between a person’s marriage and a person’s death) - but even those can be clutter when there are several other events in a person’s life.

Sorry - I assume you put some work into managing which events show up - but I really don’t like it.

I could add a setting that automatically hides events on the timeline if they are for a relative, along with a “Show hidden” link that lets you unhide them if you want.

How would people feel about this as a solution?

This was done today.