How to make a Family Tree?

Take the sentence, "Father And Mother, I Love You ". Now take the first letter of each word in this sentence and put the letters together in the same order. Look what you get! You get the word ‘Family’! Indeed family is about our parents and us. It’s about the people we live with and the people we love.

To define a family tree, I can say it is a chart that depicts the relationships between you and your family members. It lays out the hierarchy of your family. Making a family tree is an interesting activity. It requires gathering information about the structure of your family and research on the names of your family members. A family tree depicts the relationships between family members denoted by the tree. Let us now see how to make a family tree.

Few quick steps to make your family tree

• Record the information about your family members. Take help from your relatives to know more about your family hierarchy. Take references if they are available with the elders in the family. Store the recorded information on paper or as a soft copy on your computer.
• Get a chart, some color pens and other writing and drawing material. Get scissors and glue in case you need to cut out shapes from paper or stick pictures on the chart.
• Start drawing a tree structure from the information gathered. Place the names of your family members appropriately on the tree. Written names can be accompanied by photographs of family members. You can also write a small description about the member alongside his/her picture. Descriptions of family members can contain dates of their birth, death and marriage.
• Place the members on the tree in the order of the generation to which they belong. Keep space on the chart so that the tree can be extended to add in new family members.
• Genealogy software packages serve as another option to design your family tree. There are some online family tree databases that assist you in searching for your ancestors. There are websites that assist you in making family trees. PowerPoint, that gives you templates and different layouts to organize data can be used to make family trees.

If you decide to use a computer for making a family tree, you can be really innovative. You can provide links to descriptions of family members. You can display high-resolution pictures of your family members as a part of the tree. Ready made templates help you systematize your data onto the family tree. You can opt for various representations of the structure of your family. And you can actually publish the tree online for it to remain there as a reference for generations to come!

The purpose of making a family tree is in fact the creation of an information store of your family facts. It is important that the information gathered about your family is authentic. A family tree is a repository of relationships. It is a representation of the bonding between you and your family members. It is there to stay as an expression of your creativity.