If you are going to write someone’s biography then you will need tools to help you fill in spaces of time and to put perspective on that person’s life and what was happening during the times that they lived. Yes, the person’s actual life experiences are what the biography is all about but you will need memory enhancers to help you in your writing. And it is always cool to tell what else was going on at the time. You always hear about how certain events in time are burned into someone’s memory like when the Space Shuttle Challenger crashed in 1986 with the school teacher aboard. For those of us who were old enough to remember we remember exactly what we were doing when we heard the news. And when The Towers fell in New York, September 11, 2001. These are life-changing events that happen during our lifetime. Depending on the age of the person you are writing about there are other significant events that they would have remembered. So use these tools below to help you in your biography writing.
Modern history posters, find out what was happen in the year you were born: http://www.thepeoplehistory.com/publicdomainimages.html This is a fun little website that creates a poster of what was happening during the year of your birth or the birth year of the person you are writing about.
This Day in history: http://www.history.com/this-day-in-history This is a great site filled with historical information that you can use as reference for any day in history that you are writing about. It is a great writers tool as well.
Historical Information by Decade beginning 1650 to 2010: http://www.writersdreamtools.com/view/decades/default.asp?Decade=1650 This website contains information by decade including: Who’s ‘In’, Who Died, Bad Guys,
What’s ‘In’, Entertainment, Music, Literature, Art, Fashion & Beauty, Media, Money, Religion, Science. New Slang Words, etc and goes all the way back to the 1650s.
Family Search Org
https://familysearch.org
Free online service provided by the Mormon Church with the online family tree, genealogy forms, tools and even online access to historical documents such as census records. All you have to do is sign-up input your information and as much as your ancestry as you can. Within hours or a few days, the website searches for matching records for you. Once you have new sources and verified that they belong to your family line you can link the original sources to your ancestry chart for future reference. You can even add pictures of your family and ancestors to your chart.
