Making a family tree can be interesting. Here’s something on how to make one.
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.
A family tree can be defined as a chart that depicts the relationships between you and your family members. It lays out the hierarchy of your family and the relations between different members of the family. Making a family tree requires you to gather information about the structure of your family and research on the names and other details of your family members.
Quick Steps
- Record the information about your family members. Take help from your relatives to know more about your family hierarchy. Take references from 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 on the tree. Written names can be accompanied by photographs. You can also write a small description about the member alongside his/her picture. Descriptions of family members can contain dates of their birth, marriage, and death.
- Place the member names and pictures on the tree in the order of the generation to which they belong. Keep some 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 them.
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 the 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.
Easy Steps for Kids
Here, we give a pictorial representation of a simple way to make a family tree. It does not involve complex drawing, thus making it suitable for kids. Depending on their age and interests, you could suggest them enhancements in this basic design. They could draw arrows to indicate hierarchy and relationships between the family members. They could write the name of each family member beneath his/her photograph and also some quick information about them if the space allows.
Material Required
Draw a tree, sufficiently large or small so as to accommodate all the family members.
Color the tree in suitable colors.
Get pictures of the family members and cut them to the right sizes. Then glue them onto the right-sized card papers, giving them the required stiffness.
Now pin or stick the photographs on the tree. Start from the oldest generation on top and proceed to the younger ones, or do it the other way round.
The purpose of making a family tree is the creation of an information store of your family facts. It is important that the gathered information is correct. 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 and as a genealogical record.
