How to Draw a Family Tree for Genealogy
Keeping track of your family tree is a task with many benefits. Not only does a family tree serve as a record of your family's personal history, it can also provide information about family health problems. Future generations of your family will be able to use the family tree you create in order to track the genealogy of your family over generations.
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Instructions
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Gather information on all of your family members. This might include family trees created by other members of your family, or marriage, birth and death certificates for family members. Sometimes you can even find this type of information in photo albums or letters from family members. If you do not have any information, you can use search engines like ancestry.com in order to find members of your family online.
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Write your name and the date at the top of your family tree. This will serve as reference information later when someone else uses your family tree.
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Start with the youngest generation in your family and work your way backward through time. If you have children or grandchildren, start with their generation on the family tree and draw brackets and branches to connect members of the family. Vertical lines between people on the tree designate parent/child relationships while horizontal lines between family members designate husband/wife relationships.
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Identify specific information about the individuals on the family tree. Write the person's name on the tree, inside a square for males and a circle for females. Next to or under each person's name, write his birth date and death date, if applicable. Draw a diagonal line going down from right to left over the square or circle of anyone who is deceased at the time that you are putting together the family tree. If the person was adopted, draw brackets around their square or circle. If a woman in your family is pregnant, simply write the letter P in her child's square or circle.
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Connect the families by relationships. In a single nuclear family, the mother and father would have their names inside a circle and a square, respectively, and those shapes would be connected by a horizontal line. Then there would be vertical lines going down from them to connect them to each of their children; use circles for female offspring and squares for males. If you do not know how many boys or girls a particular relative had, you can use a diamond with the number of children inside it in order to indicate that they had a certain number of children of unknown names and genders. If a couple gets divorced, draw a diagonal line across the horizontal line that connects them. Add new spouses via horizontal lines on the other sides, if applicable.
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Tips & Warnings
You may need more than one sheet of paper in order to draw your entire family tree. In this case, simply make a note on one sheet to direct readers to the next sheet.
References
- Photo Credit family tree image by Judy Ben Joud from Fotolia.com
