New Aeon Timeline 3 user question. I have a timeline I’m doing for a One-Place-Study of a little railroad town in southern North Carolina that was in existence for 63 years while the railroad and post office were there. In the timeline, I’m placing events that occurred - one of those events is a Petition which was signed by a multiitude of people. I have used the standard v3 historical template to create the timeline. I want to associate the people who signed the petition with the event itself, so that when I’m done, I can filter by person or by event and see who or what is associated with whatever is filtered. I can’t figure out how do do this, or if it is even possible. Would appreciate advice and hand-holding please. Thanks in advance.
You should create a custom relationship and call it “signatory” or “signee”, then create people for all of them and add a relation/link for all of them to the event.
There is some documentation on the website on how to create and allocate relations to different items/objects/subjects in your database
I do something similar for my research about ships and seamen related to the different ships…
I recommend you creating a test database and figure out how you want the different relations to occur, because it can be a mess difficult (take a long time) to clean up if you first do some configuration wrong.
also remember that you can give the relationships different names in relation to which way the relationship goes, so you can for example call the relationship signee in the direction “from person”, and “signatories” from the event to the person, you can also put both the singular form of plural form for relationship type/name.
I also recommend that you make a list of all the different relation types you want and create them and test them out before you start adding them to your working timeline.
It may be that you also want relationship types such as railway worker, conductor, locomotive driver and other occupations for the various people, while everyone is just called employee from e.g. a business object/item in your timeline.
I learned really fast that trying to only use a few general relations in my research really fast become a shxxload of problems and it gave me no way of analyzing or finding new connections and relations between the sailors/seamen, companies, ships etc. in my timeline.
For me it was also important to try to see the different positions the seamen hold on the ships, when they went from being a stoker to being an engine boy, to being an engineer/chief engineer etc.
Just some tips from me, I have had a lot of struggles figuring out how to create multiple workarounds to limitations in AT… where I had to “invent” fictional items for documents to be able to show them in the timeline, how I for multiple events and subjects had to create duplicates of them to both have them as hierarchical “collections” and as objects in my timeline, since AT do not allow a an item to be a sub-item to multiple “parents”.