Where did the Pearsons grew up

The biggest challenge of watching This Is Us—aside from trying to deal with the writers emotionally ruining you on a weekly basis—is keeping track of the show's labyrinthine timeline, which now spans flash-forwards and flashbacks along with its present day storylines. When the show returns for the back half of season 4 this week, you can pretty much bet that things are only going to get more complicated now that the flash-forward timeline has expanded all the way to the 2040s, showing us two new generations of Pearsons. To make things a little easier, we've put together a chronological timeline of key events in the Pearsons' lives.

This Is Us doesn't typically tell us what year it is and instead uses verbal and visual hints—and aging prosthetics on the actors, obviously—to clue us into what time period we're in. So while there isn't a firm chronology for some big moments we've seen, like the weddings of Jack and Rebecca or Beth and Randall, other key events are easier to pin down to a date. For the purposes of this timeline, we're including only the latter. Keep checking back for updates as the show continues to reveal more of its twisty-turny chronology!

August 31, 1944: Jack Pearson is born.

Jack's date of birth is pretty much the first fact established in the pilot, which takes place on his 36th birthday—which also happens to be the day his three children are born, in the year 1980.

October 18, 1948: Nicky Pearson is born.

In season 3, it's revealed that Jack's younger brother Nicky did not die in Vietnam like Jack has always claimed, and is in fact still alive. The brothers' backstory is fleshed out in heartbreaking detail, showing how Jack was protective of Nicky from the moment he was born.

1950: Rebecca Malone is born.

We don't have an exact date for Rebecca's birthday, but she was 30 when she gave birth to Kevin and Kate, which puts her birth sometime in 1950.

November 27, 1969: Jack and Nicky spend one last Thanksgiving together.

As we saw in the season 4 winter finale, Thanksgiving is a tough holiday for Nicky largely because of his bittersweet memories from 1969, when he and Jack bailed on spending Thanksgiving with their abusive dad and instead went out to eat five pounds of shrimp. It... was a lot more fun and emotionally impactful than that sounds. But the brotherly happy times were short lived, because less than a week later...

December 1, 1969: Nicky gets drafted into the Vietnam War.

In a season 3 flashback, Nicky's birth date is pulled in the draft lottery, prompting Jack—as ever—to try and save him. He tries to help Nicky flee the country to get out of serving, but Nicky refuses to run from his duty. In retrospect... he maybe should have. A few months later, Jack voluntarily enlists in order to be by Nicky's side, after receiving a few worrying letters from his brother who's struggling in Vietnam. Jack does this against his doctor's orders, having been declared unfit to serve because of his irregular heartbeat.

But Nicky proves to be beyond Jack's help, and his instability results in tragedy after he accidentally causes the death of a local child. Jack, unable to forgive Nicky or even hear his side of the story, cuts his brother out of his life.

1972: Jack and Rebecca meet.

No This Is Us fan will ever hear "Moonshadow" the same way again. After he returns from Vietnam, Jack narrowly avoids falling into a life of crime thanks to a chance encounter with Rebecca, whom he sees in a bar performing the Cat Stevens classic. Thanks to a script page from the season 1 finale published online by EW, we know that this fateful night falls in 1972.

January 20, 1980: The Big Three are conceived.

Yup, we have a date for this, but not for Jack and Rebecca's actual wedding (which took place sometime after 1972 and before 1980 at City Hall). Early in season 1, it's revealed that Rebecca became pregnant with triplets after having victory sex with Jack in a bar bathroom, thanks to the Pittsburgh Steelers winning the Super Bowl. Such is the strength of Jack and Rebecca's Steelers fandom!

August 31, 1980: The Big Three are born.

Rebecca goes into labor in the pilot, and while Kevin and Kate are born healthy, the third triplet (who was to be named Kyle) is stillborn. In the hospital, a grieving Jack encounters a fireman who just brought in an orphan baby, born earlier that day and abandoned on the steps of the fire house. That baby, of course, is Randall.

1981: Rebecca finds William.

A few months after bringing the Big Three home from the hospital, Rebecca seeks out Randall's birth father, William Hill, who is struggling with drug addiction and gave Randall up because he knew he couldn't give him the life he deserved. Though the pair stay intermittently in touch over the years, Rebecca doesn't allow William to see Randall, understandably concerned about the impact it could have.

December 24, 1989: Kate is hospitalized for an appendectomy.

Nine years after the birth of the Big Three, Rebecca ends up reuniting with Dr. K, the kind physician who delivered Kevin and Kate and counseled Jack through the loss of Kyle. This touching scene happens on Christmas Eve, while Kate is in surgery to have her appendix removed.

August 31, 1990: Kevin declares his love for Sophie.

The trio's 10th birthday was a big one for Kevin, who decides that he's in love with Kate's childhood BFF, Sophie, during the celebrations. Kevin and Sophie were high school sweethearts and even ended up getting married–but as we'll see later, that doesn't end well.

February 1992: Jack sees Nicky for the last time.

Nicky sent postcards to Jack for years in the hopes of reconnecting, and Jack ignored all of them until 1992, when he finally went to see his brother, who is doing about as not-great as can be expected. Jack doesn't tell Rebecca where he's going, allowing her to keep believing that Nicky is dead—and keeps Nicky at arm's length throughout the meeting. This is the last time the brothers ever see each other.

February 14, 1996: Jack falls off the wagon.

After a memorably horrible Valentine's Day fight with Rebecca, Jack ends up at their favorite date spot alone, where he orders a whiskey after years of sobriety. Rebecca refuses to give up on Jack, despite their rocky recent relationship, and within a few months Jack is sober again and attending AA meetings.

January 25, 1998: Jack Pearson dies.

Honestly, none of us need to relive the details of this. Suffice it to say, it was Super Bowl Sunday, the Pearson house caught fire, Jack saved his entire family—including Kate's dog—before dying from a heart attack hours later. It was all the Crock-Pot's fault.

Fall 1998: Beth and Randall meet at college.

Randall abandoned his original plan to attend Howard University, opting for Carnegie Mellon instead because it's closer to home in Pittsburgh and he wants to be around to support his mom. There at a freshman mixer, he met Beth for the first time, who's recovering from the loss of her own father. A power couple is born!

2005: Kevin and Sophie break up.

When Kevin reconnects with Sophie in season 1, she mentions that she hasn't seen him in 12 years, which puts their last interaction sometime in 2005. Although Sophie's been a pretty big presence in the show and dated Kevin throughout much of seasons 1 and 2, we've seen surprisingly little of their backstory—but we do know that the marriage ended because he cheated on her.

October 31, 2008: Tess Pearson is born.

Who could forget Beth dramatically giving birth to she and Randall's first baby on the living room floor during Halloween, when all the roads were closed? Beth and Randall's wedding, by the way, is another event we don't have an exact date for, but we can assume it's somewhere between the year 2002 (when they graduated college) and 2008.

Late 2008: Rebecca and Miguel reconnect.

Shortly after Tess is born, Rebecca gets a Facebook message out of the blue from Miguel, who we later learn she hasn't seen in eight years. We've seen very little of Rebecca and Miguel's relationship backstory, but this is surely the beginning.

August 31, 2016: The Big Three have a pivotal birthday.

36 was a major birthday for all three Pearson siblings, as the This Is Us pilot demonstrates. Randall finds his birth father, William, after years of searching. Kevin has a midlife crisis and quits his hit TV sitcom, The Manny. And Kate meets Toby, her soon-to-be fiancé, at a weight loss support group.

December 2016: Kate and Toby get engaged.

After Toby dramatically collapses on Christmas Eve and is hospitalized for a heart attack, Kate realizes just how much he means to her, and the pair get engaged after just four months of dating.

Fall 2017: Beth and Randall become foster parents.

Shortly after Randall's 37th birthday, he and Beth decide to become foster parents rather than adopt, and specifically hope to help an older child that might have a harder time getting placed. They foster a troubled, sensitive 12-year-old named Deja, and ultimately adopt her a year later.

November 22, 2018: Tess comes out.

Tess opened up about her sexuality to Kate during Thanksgiving, but wasn't yet ready to tell her parents. After Rebecca found out Tess's secret from a loose-lipped Kate, she encouraged her to tell Beth and Randall, who were of course nothing but supportive like the dream parents they are.

2020: Kevin gets engaged to a mystery woman.

The season 4 winter finale ended with a flash-forward to the Big Three's 40th birthday (on August 31, 2020), and it's fair to say that a lot is going to change in the nine months between Thanksgiving 2019 and that day. As of the siblings' big 4-0, Kevin is engaged to an unknown woman who's also expecting his child. Oh, and he and Randall are no longer speaking. Rebecca's dementia symptoms have also significantly worsened in the nine-month interim.

Approximately 2034: The family reunites at Rebecca’s bedside.

In the final moments of season 2 and season 3, we flash forward into a mysterious future in which Rebecca seems to be dying, and Randall, Beth, Toby, and Nicky are at her bedside. Kevin is "on his way," but his teenage son (!) is there, and Kate is conspicuously absent.

We don't know exactly when the flash-forward timeline is taking place, but PopSugar has a pretty good theory placing it in 2034: Randall tells 10-year-old Tess that she'll "still be having dinner with him when she's 25," which would suggest the flash-forward is 15 years later, in 2034. This would also mean that the Big Three are 53 in the flash-forward—a.k.a. the same age Jack was when he died. That's fine. I'm fine.

Approximately 2045: Jack Pearson Damon meets his future wife Lucy.

Kate and Toby's adult son Jack (played by actor Blake Stadnik) is introduced in a pretty spectacular twist at the end of the season 4 finale. Shortly after meeting and falling for a waitress named Lucy—who later becomes pregnant with his baby—Jack Jr. is seen performing to an adoring crowd of fans, suggesting that he's a highly successful musician. In other words, he's achieved the kind of career that both his mother and grandmother dreamed of before him. Assuming Jack is around the same age as Stadnik (late-20s), and since he was born in 2019, that would put the year at roughly 2045.

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Emma Dibdin is a freelance writer based in Los Angeles who writes about culture, mental health, and true crime. She loves owls, hates cilantro, and can find the queer subtext in literally anything.

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