Family Timeline: Smart Search

Since Heredis 2026, Family Chronology becomes Family Timeline.

Be it for direct-line ancestors only, or for your extended family, or, as another example, for the primary person’s ancestors and descendants, you can:

• chronologically track ancestors
• trace back surnames used across time
• locate ancestors’ birthplaces throughout ages

(Windows) To access the Family Timeline feature, click on the Charts > Family Timeline menu.
(Mac) To access the Family Timeline feature, click on the Documents > Family Timeline menu.

A window will pop open showing various persons on a timeline. To learn more about how the interface works in general, see Family Timeline: Interface overview.

Smart Search enables you to scan your genealogy for persons sharing common criteria, and to manage them as a whole.
Take, for example, all the persons born in the same city, or bearing the same surname.

Run the Smart Search and process the results. See also the Smart Search article.

As the Smart Search is an extremely thorough tool, we’ll use just one example here, but many other criteria can be selected.

First example: let’s look in the entire file for all the persons bearing the SMIT surname, so as to include only those with this surname in the Family Timeline.

We’ll select Persons > Surname > Begins With [to make sure we also include the SMITS with an S at the end] > Smit.

Search All criteria in the entire file.

The sentence in blue, right below, rephrases your search: “I’m looking for persons whose surname begins with “SMIT”. This is indeed what I am looking for.

Click the Search button to launch the Smart Search.

Consult the results, then click on the Family Chronology button in the Processing selected persons area in order to generate their distribution on the timeline.

A window opens up with the Smart Search results only displayed in the Family Timeline.
You can then customize your timeline as described above in Grouping and Interface Overview articles.

The Family Timeline can also be launched from the Charts (Windows) or Documents (Mac) menu, as described before.

To generate the Family Timeline with the results of a Smart Search for which results are still available, click on the Options button and choose Smart Search. Heredis will then display the list of persons resulting from the Smart Search still current under the Search tab.

Customize your timeline according to your needs.
You can use any type of Smart Search to generate a Family Timeline.

See also the articles Family Timeline: Interface overview, Family Timeline: Grouping, Export a personal or family timeline or wheel for printing.