Drawing up a family (genealogical) tree is an exciting activity that helps you learn a lot about your family tree and perpetuate information about your roots, and then pass this information on to your children. The easiest way to create an ascending tree is one that starts with you and grows by adding information about your ancestors.
It is necessary
Sheet of paper, writing object, materials from the family archive
Instructions
Step 1
Take a sheet of paper, place it horizontally and identify yourself at the bottom in the center of the sheet. Draw two lines upward from you in opposite directions. Above one of them, write information about the mother, above the second - about the father. Continue to develop the tree to the sides and upward, writing in there the information that you know yourself - about grandmothers, grandfathers and other relatives. This will be a rough draft of your family tree.
Step 2
Use lines to indicate family ties between parents and children, and with the help of double lines or a plus sign, the relationship between spouses. You can indicate only minimal information about relatives (surnames, first names, dates of birth and death), but it is better to supplement it with information about the profession, place of birth, hereditary diseases, etc.
Step 3
When your knowledge of relatives is exhausted, turn to older family members on the maternal and paternal lines. Also use the family archive: photo albums, death certificates, work books, letters, etc. Make copies of all documents important to you, as well as photographs of each family member. Supplement your tree with this information.
Step 4
When your family can't help you anymore, head to your local archive. There you can find information about those ancestors on which your tree breaks off and, possibly, learn something about their life and about their parents. Parish (church metric) books can also serve as a good source of information about ancestors.
Step 5
If you feel great difficulty in finding information on your own, you can contact one of the specialized firms, where for a certain fee they will collect information about your ancestors for you, trace the history of your surname and even find distant relatives.
Step 6
When you are satisfied with the amount of information collected, and the draft family tree seems to you quite voluminous, you can proceed to the final stage - the registration of the information received. To do this, you can use a large sheet of Whatman paper and draw (or draw) a family tree by hand, if you wish, pasting photographs of relatives there.
Step 7
If the manual design seems too long and laborious for you, you can use one of the many computer programs that allow you to quickly and easily create an electronic version of the family tree. The result of your work can be printed, posted on the Internet, or simply saved to disk.
