How to make a family tree. Step-by-step instruction

2024 Author: Priscilla Miln | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 00:21

Questions about relatives and ancestors often arise in the family circle, when grandparents begin to remember their childhood, parents and other relatives. How to make a family tree quickly and easily without knowledge of genealogy?

Why you need to make a family tree

This is one of the most important stages - motivation. He simply will not allow to abandon the compilation of the tree in a couple of weeks, but to bring it to the end. There are several reasons that encourage people to think about compiling a family tree:

• desire to satisfy the inexplicable sentimentality that comes with age;
• let your children feel respect for their roots, relatives, family history and customs;
• visually show your children how large the number of relatives you can rely on in difficult times;
• to realize how big your family tree is, to feel like part of a large community that has its own destiny anddestination;
• satisfy your curiosity about being distantly related to celebrities, find something interesting and mysterious in your roots and branches.

You may have other motives as well. Those who build a family tree professionally recommend not starting an investigation of their tree for belonging to noble families or classifying themselves as descendants of famous historical figures. Usually this does not lead to anything good, since these searches will cost a lot of money, the evidence will be inconclusive, and the case itself will quickly get bored and is unlikely to end successfully.

How to make a family tree

Paper formations, grouping of relatives, folders with papers are already a thing of the past. Although there is sometimes a need to make some notes, it is best to use specialized programs that help you conveniently compose the found data about relatives and display them in a convenient and pleasant way. There are also various online services that can help you collect data about your relatives.

There are sites where you can create a family tree online. With their help, deciding how to create a family tree becomes as simple as possible. Usually, free registration is required, information is entered for each relative, his family ties and photos, and the service itself produces a graphical construction of the family tree. There are professional services like myheritage, with a lot ofsettings that will not only show how to compile a family tree correctly, but also analyze the surname, search through archives, etc. Online services are convenient for those who do not take the issue very seriously, or for building a simple tree and its design. According to statistics, sites on average "live" up to 5 years and for various reasons may disappear from the information space along with your data.

For more in-depth work on your pedigree, it is best to use special programs, information from which can be saved, archived, duplicated and processed on any device and at the same time be independent of the Web. Free programs are mostly very simple, have little functionality and are good for simple tree building. More professional programs are usually paid, but with them the question of how to make a family tree of a family, even a very large family, is solved efficiently and conveniently. For example, the program "Tree of Life" in the free version has some limitations, but allows you to get acquainted with its work. The full version costs about 400 rubles. The amount is not very large, but it makes you wonder how serious you are about working.

Starting the formation of the tree from ourselves

After choosing a means of building a tree, questions arise: how to make a family tree and where to start creating it? It's easiest to start with yourself. In a program or service, enter information about yourself, then about your immediate environment - about everyone you know personally and about whomown information. You insert photos of these people from your hard drive or, if they are not there, scan or re-photograph paper portraits from albums. Attach photos, make connections, enter comments (such as a short biography) until personal knowledge runs out.

Continue building the tree

The next step is a meeting with relatives. We arrange a meeting with relatives from the necessary “branches” of the tree, take a cake and a laptop (or better, a voice recorder). During the conversation, you can get a lot of information that fills in the gaps in the family tree. At the same time, you can make a big mistake by not going to relatives, but by gathering a large number of them in one place in order to interview them. This usually results in old people correcting each other, disagreeing on different dates, arguing about events, and generally causing significant chaos in the orderly scheme of your work. Therefore, thinking about how to make a family tree quickly, it is better not to take risks, but to talk with each relative separately.

Initially visit the oldest relatives. They can tell the most about distant relatives, time gaps, and with a good location, they will allow you to use their rare photographs in albums.

It will be more convenient to conduct a conversation if, before starting it, make a mini-questionnaire of 10-15 questions: first and last names, important dates in life (birth, wedding, life events, death), children and parents.

Continue gathering information

After we have collected data from everyone who was nearby, the next step will be to communicate with those who live far away, in other cities and countries. The easiest way to communicate with them is by phone, Skype or through social networks. After talking with them, you can ask them questions and briefly tell them how to make a family tree. They can build their own branch and send it to you to add it to your big tree. This is very convenient, since it is quite difficult to do such work alone. Therefore, having interested your relatives in this process, you can significantly facilitate your work. You can promise them a free copy of the tree when it is completed or when as much information as possible has been collected.

Working with archives and databases

The last step in collecting information is working with archives. After collecting all possible information from "living" sources and their memories, the next step is to work with paper and electronic archives. This work is especially useful in cases where the branch broke off at some stage and it is not known, for example, whom the great-great-grandfather married or on which front and when the great-grandfather died in the Finnish War, what awards the grandfather received during the war. Such information can be obtained from various archives or databases. Be sure to double-check the information, as there are often namesakes, even full namesakes of people, otherwise your searches may go into other people's "trees".

Schemes for building a family tree

When the information is collected, the question arises of how to make a family tree. The layout and placement scheme may be different. The difference in the schemes is the person placed as the basis. You can build from a well-known representative of the genus to the modern generation. This option more clearly shows the presence of children in this ancestor and their division into different family branches.

There are more options on how to make a family tree. An example of a standard scheme, the most common, is shown in the figure. The tree is usually built like this: you are located below, your parents stand above, then grandparents, etc. The branches expand from the bottom up. Below are the children. Designate yourself as the foundation.