Why Draw? Normally a timeline is the equivalent of a card index, with each card associated with a date and the card contents dealing with what happened on that date.
I beg to differ. After the request in the link you referenced, I did a bit of googling and the term
timeline seems to have a variety of meanings ranging from a line with text boxes and dates (see my beautiful oeuvre below)
through Gantt charts
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gantt_chart ( to your
equivalent of a card index, and then on to heaven knows what. Some of the commercial vesrions of "timelines" seem designed to obfuscate any information the original data may have held.
Here seems to be a wiki example of what I tend to think of as a "narrative" which seems to correspond to the file cards you refer to.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timeline_of_World_War_I.
I think we need a clear idea of what the OP needs. I think keme is referring to a Gantt chart, for example whereas when I hear "timeline" I tend to think of my beautiful illustration above.