The more I work with AncestryPress, the more I like it - and the more things I find that need to be improved (read more about my first impressions of AncestryPress). The good news is that the product is a work in process, so some of my initial "wish list" items have already been incorporated. But for those hoping for automatically created "coffee-table quality" books, you'll need to rearrange your expectations. Even with the pre-fab templates and drag-and-drop embellishments, it can take quite a bit of editing and rearranging to get a page looking the way you want. Or if you're on the other end of the spectrum and looking for more creative license, then you'll find the number of embellishments and drop-ins to be a bit limiting (you might want to try a good digital software package instead).

This week I decided to tackle the timeline template, but as Randy Seaver notes, the basic timeline template is a disappointment. Especially the actual timeline itself. My great grandmother, Effie Bishop Koth, lived from 1892 - 1981, a time rich in American and World history. Yet, her automatically generated timeline in AncestryPress included just four historical events - the first dinosaur in America, Picasso's blues period, the Hindenberg disaster, and Kenya banning the sale of ivory. Looking at the auto-generated page, you'd never know that she lived through both World Wars, plus Korea and Vietnam (and had children and grandchildren that served in all but WWI). She was a child when Henry Ford introduced the automobile, and the Wright Brothers flew their first airplane. She lived through the Great Flu Epidemic of 1918 and the Stock Market crash of 1929. Yet, none of those seemingly major events appear on her timeline. Since everyone will find different events to be useful, or of interest, what I would really like to see here is a drag and drop timeline tool, which lists major events by year that can be dropped right onto your timeline.

After finding the basic timeline template to be less than satisfying, I decided to play around with it a bit to see what I could do to spice things up. To begin, I decided to go with a simple timeline of the life of a couple. So I added in Effie's husband, including his dates of birth and death. This fit well with the fact that most of the photos I had were of them together anyway. I next extended the timeline to begin and end closer to their lifespan, rather than the default which went from 1860 (30 years before they were born) and ran into the future. I then used the copy and paste feature to add some additional timeline elements, and edited the timeline to include my own historical events rather than the ones Ancestry chose.

I wanted a way to get in a little story that Charles wrote about his bride, so I dragged over one of the journaling pads and added the text of his story. I originally rotated the journal embellishment, but after finding that I couldn't also rotate the text, I went back to the straight approach. Another item for the wish list ;-)

While working on my page today, I learned a few new things about AncestryPress:

• New records added to your family tree are not made available to add to existing pages. If you create a "new page," however, you'll find the latest content from your family tree -- including events and records -- available in your sidebar.

• After getting frustrated over and over with trying to get things to line up just the way I wanted them, I read the Ancestry FAQ and learned that you can use the arrow keys on your keyboard to "nudge" selected items.

My final timeline page is far from perfect, but looks a little more polished now than the original version (at least I think so). I hope, however, to see more of this become automated in the future, however - at least for those looking for "easy." It would be nice to take a basic page and choose a theme - which would automatically add a coordinating background and embellishments for you to work with. Many, many more embellishments and color choices are needed as well (although you can upload your own, which is my next project). More text editing would also be good - more font choices, the ability to rotate text, etc.