In the process of organizing the life of Esther Latrobe into a chronology, I was able to learn a lot about not only her life, but the context in which she lived and the history beyond her memoirs. After reading and picking apart her writing, the information was somewhat organized but mainly jumbled and it was difficult to really see the substance of her life. Looking into the current events in the areas in which she lived helped to redefine what may have been important events surrounding her life that she chose not to mention in her memoirs, but were integral to understanding her time in the Moravian church and the several countries in which she lived. We were also able to look into the lives of Esther’s downline and the legacies of the Latrobes who lived after her, which shed an important light on the prominence of the Latrobe family in the Moravian Church and in Europe in general. After creating our timeline, I definitely agree with Grafton’s claims about the importance of chronology, and the way that it makes sense and order out of seemingly unrelated information. We were able to take events that were not necessarily complimentary to each other and relate them through current events and chronology and create significance from limited information. We did certainly face a few issues in our timeline making process; because of the emphasis put on Esther’s sickness in her memoirs, we had little substantial historical information that we could elaborate through research, however it was surprising to me what we were able to decipher using careful and precise research. While her memoirs tell a story of her relationship to god and her continuous illness, our timeline tells a story of her life and its surroundings, and the impact that she and her family had on the world after her death.
