How to Make a Family Tree
Everybody knows the song “I’m My Own Grandpa” where a man traces his lineage and proves how he can be his own grandfather. This is probably not the case with your family, but knowing how to make a family tree is a useful skill nonetheless. A long time ago, families used to stay in the same general area so it wasn’t too hard to figure out who was related to whom and what the relationship was. Now, however, families are getting more far flung by the day. It is possible to move three thousand miles away from home and run into a cousin that you never knew you had (who incidentally has moved about a thousand miles away from where he or she grew up).
A brief description
A family tree is basically just a chart that maps out how people are related to each other. Typically it starts with one person and moves back through the generations. Family trees can stretch back as far as you want if you can locate the information.
Get Going
Start building your family tree by getting a large sheet of paper. Place your own name at the top of the tree. Now, draw lines extending downward from yourself and write your mother’s name at the end of one line and your father’s name at the end of the other. From each of them, draw two lines and put-in the names of your grandparents. You can keep going this way for as many generations as you have information about. This is the simplest way to trace your family line. If you are interested in your extended family, you can add your siblings, aunts, uncles and their children, etc. The amount of detail that goes into your family tree and how many generations it covers is entirely up to you.
Mapping out your family tree can be quite time consuming depending on the size of your family and the scope of your family information. Chances are that you will have to do some research into your genealogy, after all most people can only name a few generations’ worth of relatives. Many of us come from people in European, African and Asian countries and old records may prove difficult to locate.
There are all sorts of websites available that will help you trace your genealogy and give you the birth and death records that you might be missing. Some of these sites can also be helpful in tracing your family tree out through cousins and aunts and uncles as well as grandparents. In addition to genealogy tracing websites, there are genealogy software and computer programs that are fairly inexpensive to help you build your family tree. These computer programs can help you construct any type of family tree that you want but if you don’t mind taking a little bit of time, you can just as easily plot out your family tree yourself.
Everybody can learn how to make a family tree. Making a family tree may require a good amount of time but it can also be extremely interesting. After all, everybody likes to know who and where they came from.