As I sit and type this post, my printer is busily chugging away, printing out our “Book of Centuries” pages.

After reviewing several different types available online, free downloads and downloads to purchase and hard copy books to order… I just made up my own.  None of the ones I saw matched precisely how I wanted to do it.  And I like desktop publishing stuff and figured I could do a decent job of something pretty easily.

I ended up doing a very plain and basic timeline across the top of the page — the colour and interest will come from the entries themselves, I didn’t want the timeline to be a distraction, just a guideline.

I also left the pages themselves completely blank.  Many options online use divided sections, say, one for “important people” and one for “events” or “inventions” or “wars” or whatever.  And while that’s very nice to keep things organized like that, my worry would be that one century might have a whole lot of “important people” and not as many “events”, or the other way around, so that we’d run out of room in one block but have empty space in another.  Even unlabeled, blank blocks seemed unnecessarily limiting to my way of operating.  So, each page is just open for whatever.

The other major decision I had to make was whether to organize it as one century per 2-page spread with various events etc being placed together on the page, or to give each event etc its own page, with centuries being marked with dividers.

I decided that as nice as it would be to have room for detail for each event or person, the true purpose of the Book of Centuries is to make it easy to see how different events relate to each other in the context of time.  If each event is on a separate page, that is less obvious.  Having them all together in one visual context makes it more clear.

I’m sure the other way is perfect for some kids, but I think this makes more sense for us.  The place for the “detail” will be in our other works and studies… the Book of Centuries won’t be the repository for all things learned, it will be the summary of how the things learned relate to each other.

Our first two-page spread is ? to 3000BC, which I just called “Pre-History.”  I don’t want to get into “age of earth” debates, and while we’re nominally Christian, I don’t believe it’s possible to get a completely accurate timeline of Biblical history, or even 100% sort out what is historical fact and which is instructional parable etc.   And I was married to a biblical scholar (and ordained minister) for 7 years, so I know a wee bit about this topic.     So, rather than trying to artificially insert biblical history into some constructed chronology, we’re going to treat it much more generally.  If he wants to go into more detailed study of of biblical timelines, he can do so when he’s older and ready to handle the intricacies, complexities, apparent contradictions, variant sources, translation issues, etc etc etc…. anything less is unfair to the material.

Anyway, after 3000BC we have 100 years per two-page spread until 1500AD.  Then I made it every 50 years until 1900, where it moves to decades.

I’m using heavy paper, it’s not cover stock weight but it’s quite thick.  I just happened to unpack it from a random box a few days ago, I didn’t even realize we had it and the package is long gone, so I don’t truly know what weight it is.  But it was a most fortuitous discovery, and I don’t believe in luck!

My printer does automatic duplex (2-sided) printing, so there’s no fiddling around with organizing the pages after printing or anything like that.  I just have to punch the holes, trim the tops off the pages within the more recent centuries, and pop them into a big 3-ring binder.  Voila!

If you’re curious, here is a sample of one of my century pages.   If people are interested in the whole thing I can make the whole thing into a pdf file and give more detailed instructions.

Oh, perfect timing.  My printer just finished.  Time to go hole-punch 67 heavy pages…

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