Every civilization, every invention, every war, every restoration of freedom, laid out on one map of time, around the moment everything else turns on: the Atonement of Jesus Christ. Then add your own family, and watch where they stood in all of it.
Free to explore · No account needed · Works on phone, tablet and computer
This is a tool for every age, a way to see the whole story of the world at once, and to find where your family stands inside it.
Most timelines give you a list of dates. This one gives you a pattern. You can zoom all the way out and take in six thousand years in a single glance, or zoom all the way in on one afternoon in one city and read what happened, what the scriptures say about it, and what evidence we actually have.
At the very center sits the Atonement of Jesus Christ. That is a deliberate choice. It is the claim the whole timeline is built to let you test: that everything before it was pointing forward to it, everything after it points back, and it is the one event that makes every other kind of progress finally mean something.
You decide what is on the screen. Every kind of event sits on its own layer that you can switch on or off, so the timeline can be as simple or as dense as the person looking at it needs. Turn everything off but the scripture stories and you have a quiet tool for family scripture study, one that shows your children exactly where a story happened and when. Turn the rest back on and it becomes a study of the whole world. And it is personal: it doubles as a family history tool, so the ancestors you find as you do genealogy can be placed on the same timeline and seen in their real moment in history.
Little children can ride along and look at the pictures. Older kids can take a narrated tour. Teenagers and adults can turn on the harder layers and wrestle with the real history, including the parts that are ugly, and the parts scholars still argue about.
Four things show up again and again once you can see all of history side by side.
The timeline is deliberately built outward from the Atonement in both directions. Zoom out and you can see it sitting at the middle of everything, the hinge that the covenants, the prophecies, and the whole human story turn on.
Knowledge compounds. Writing makes records possible; records make scripture possible; the printing press puts scripture in ordinary hands; and a farm boy with a Bible he could actually read walks into a grove of trees. Each light makes the next light possible, and the work moves forward.
The same discovery that blesses the world gets turned against it. The press that printed scripture printed propaganda. The chemistry that made medicine made weapons. The network that carries the gospel to every nation carries the worst things people have ever made. Every real advance arrives with its own shadow, and the timeline shows both.
Mark where liberty was lost and you have marked where invention, prosperity and learning went quiet, often for centuries, and always in that part of the world. Freedom is more than one nice thing among many. It is the soil the rest of it grows in.
It works like a map. Drag to move, pinch to zoom, tap anything that looks interesting.
Pinch on a touchscreen, scroll on a computer, or use the + and − buttons on the right. It opens zoomed all the way out, so the first thing to do is zoom in. Events only reveal their titles as you get closer.
Click or touch anywhere on the star field and drag. Moving left goes back toward the Creation; moving right comes forward toward today.
Every event opens a card with what happened, the scriptures that record it, how it points to Christ, and, where the location is known, a map you can pan around. This is where the real reading happens.
Four round buttons sit in the top-left corner: 🔍 to search, 👁 for views and narrated tours, ☰ for layers, and 🌍 for the world, place by place. Tap ☰ and a panel opens with every layer of events, each with its own switch. This is the control you will use most: switch everything off except the one thread you want, and the timeline quiets right down to just that story. Having them all on at once is overwhelming on purpose. It is meant to be narrowed.
Not sure where to start? Tap 👁 and then 🎤 Narrate. Four narrated tours walk the timeline for you, stopping at each place with something written to read aloud: The Restoration Story, Prophecies of the Atonement, Heavenly Father and Families, andThree narrated tours walk the timeline for you, stopping at each place with something written to read aloud: Prophecies of the Atonement, God and Families, and When the Earth Shook — Faith in Disaster. This is the best way to walk a child through it the first time.
Tap 👁, then ☪ Hand and everything dims except the events where His hand is most visible, which then name themselves on screen. The Atonement blazes at the center. It is the four-part pattern below, shown rather than argued.
Tap 👁, then 🕐 Prophecy and glowing arcs leap from each prophecy to the moment it came true: Isaiah to Bethlehem, Daniel to the RestorationDaniel to the rise of Rome. Tap any arc to read both ends side by side and how many centuries stood between them.
Tap 👁, then 🌿 Seeds to see truths Heavenly FatherGod placed in cultures all over the world long before any missionary arrived: honoring parents in China, the Creator Father across Africa and Native America, the flood remembered on every continent.
Tap 👁, then ▶ Chain and sit back. Twenty-one links light up one at a time, travelling the timeline as they go, from fire and writing through Abraham and Rome and the printing press to a fourteen-year-old boy in a grove.Nineteen links light up one at a time, travelling the timeline as they go, from fire and writing through Abraham and Rome and the printing press to the freedom to worship. This is the best two minutes on the whole timeline.
Tap 🔍 in the top-left corner and type any person, place or event; the timeline jumps to it. On a tablet or a computer, the era buttons along the bottom (Creation, Patriarchs, Exodus, Kings, Prophets, Christ, Apostasy, RestorationEarly Church, Reformation, Modern, Today) to jump straight there.
Under 👁, the two little arrows swap which way time runs. ↔ scrolls across history, which suits a wide screen. ↕ scrolls down through it, which is far easier to hold and read aloud on a phone.
The simplest thing you can do with it, and the one worth doing first: show your children where tonight’s scripture story happened, and when.
Open ☰ and switch off Civilizations, Inventions, Wars and the rest until only Gospel Stories is lit, or only Book of Mormon, if that is where you are reading. Now the timeline is showing your children one thing instead of six thousand years of everything.
Search the name (Noah, Moses, Daniel, Nephi) or scroll to the era and tap it. The card tells you when it happened and gives you the scripture references, so you can read it right there.
Open the map on the event card. Suddenly the ark, or the Red Sea, or the Sacred Grove is a real place on a real earth instead of somewhere vague and far away. For a young child this is often the moment it stops being a fairy tale.
Zoom out a little and let them see how far back it sits, and how far it is from today. Older children can flip the World layer back on to see what everyone else on earth was doing that same year, which is usually the moment the whole thing gets interesting.
The timeline ships with the history of the world. You add the history of your family, and watch it take shape across it.
As you do genealogy, add what you find. Tap 📚 Studies, then My Family History, and put an ancestor onto the timeline at the year they were born, the year they emigrated, the year they were baptised, the year they died. Each one lands on the Family Story layer, in its true place in history.
Do that for a while and something appears that a pedigree chart cannot show you: how your family actually formed. Two lines a thousand miles apart, generations before they had any idea the other existed, drifting through centuries and continents until they finally meet, and the result is the child sitting next to you. On a chart that is a set of boxes. On a timeline it is a story with a shape.
It also puts your ancestors inside history instead of beside it. Switch the world layers back on and you can see what your people were living through: which grandfather was alive when that war broke out, which line was in that country during the famine, who was already on the earth when the Restoration beganthe Reformation began, who crossed the ocean in the same decade the railroad was finished. The names in your family tree stop being names and start being people who stood somewhere, at some moment, while the world was doing something.
That is the whole point of the family history layer. The scriptures on one side, the world on another, and your own grandmother on the same screen as both, which is exactly where she belongs. Children who know where their family came from are steadier and braver for it, and this gives that knowledge somewhere to live.
Where your entries are kept: what you add is saved on the device you added it on, so it is still there when you come back. What is being built next is one shared family record behind your account, so the family stories you write in the Little Scripture Travelers app, the ancestors you place on this timeline, and the virtues those stories teach in the Virtue Library all become the same family history, reachable from any device.
Each layer is a different thread running through the same history. Tap ☰ in the top-left corner to switch any of them on or off. Overlay them and the connections between them start to show.
A timeline that shades the truth to make a point is worth nothing. So every event is labelled with how well it is actually established.
The point is to lay the real record out plainly (dates, discoveries, disagreements and all) and let people look, rather than argue anyone into anything. If the honest evidence for something is thin, it is marked thin. Truth does not need help from exaggeration, and faith that has to be protected from the facts was never worth much anyway.
The first is inside every story and event, the second is the globe button at the top; the rest sit behind the 📚 Studies button in the bottom-left corner of the timeline.
Open any bedtime story or event and see what else was happening at that very time on every other line of the timeline: who was ruling, what was being built, what was being written. One tap reads it; another opens it.
Tap the globe button beside the floating controls, turn the world, and tap a land to read its whole story from the earliest record to today, with every event of the timeline that happened there in order, each opening to its full study.
Gethsemane, the trials, the cross, the tomb and the Resurrection: what He suffered and what it did for every person, with every scripture that speaks of the Atonement quoted beside it. Then all the evidence of His life, death and rising: the witnesses who wrote, the stones, pools, tombs and bones the ground has given up, the oldest manuscripts, and the Shroud of Turin with its whole scientific argument, every piece carrying the timeline’s honest label and its sources. Tap the Savior anywhere on the timeline and it opens.
The person and the family, or the class and the collective: the times history ran the test on the same people at once, what each did to families and to prosperity, with the evidence graded honestly and the scriptures beside it.
Every people of the Americas, from the Inuit to the Selk’nam: where they lived about 1500, how they lived, what they ate and what they believed. Where their traditions, customs or history have been connected with Israel, the Book of Mormon or a teacher who came among them, the connection is set out with an honest grade of where it comes from; where there is none, nothing is claimed. The globe shows where each people lived, and zooms in to the map’s own countries and states.
Every event on the timeline gathered into one place to read straight through and compare, instead of hunting for them one tap at a time.
Prophecies that were written down before the thing they describe happened, each with the text, the fulfilment, the evidence, and the years between. Every one carries an honest rating of how strong that evidence is.
Every tradition in its own words (Catholic, Orthodox, Lutheran, Baptist, Methodist, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, Buddhism and more), each answering the same three questions of the soul: where did I come from, why am I here, where do I go?
Four patterns that repeat across history, each laid out with how strong the evidence for it actually is, and one honest caution about what the evidence does not show. The common factor in every catastrophe on it is compulsion, never a religion.
Add your own people to the timeline: an ancestor at the year they were born, the ship they came over on, the farm they broke. Your family stops being a separate story and takes its place inside the one Heavenly FatherGod has been telling all along.
This is meant to be an ever-growing timeline, broad enough to hold the whole world, and never really finished. New events, new evidence and new connections get added over time. Come back and there will be more of it than there was before.
Best on a big screen the first time. Then it travels fine in a pocket.
