Often questions about relatives and ancestors arise in the family circle when the memories of grandparents begin about their childhood, parents and other relatives. How to make a family tree quickly and easily, without knowledge of the genealogy?
Why you need to make a family tree
This is one of the most important stages - motivation. He simply will not allow abandoning 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 inexplicable sentimentality that appears with age;
- make your children feel respect for their roots, relatives, family history and its customs;
- demonstrate to your children how large the number of relatives you can rely on in difficult times;
- to realize how great your family tree is, to feel like part of a large community that has its own destiny and destiny;
- to satisfy your curiosity for the distant relationship with celebrities, to find something interesting and mysterious in their roots and branches.
There is a possibility that you have other motives. Those who are engaged in the construction of the family tree professionally recommend not to start an investigation of their tree for belonging to noble families or to classify 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 are unlikely to end successfully.
With what to make a family tree
Paper constructions, 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 in collecting data about your relatives.
There are sites where online family tree creation is possible. With their help, the solution of the question of how to create a family tree becomes as simple as possible. Usually, free registration, entering information for each relative, his family ties and photographs is required, and the service itself graphically constructs the family tree. There are professional services such as myheritage, with a large number of settings that not only show how to make the family tree correctly, but also analyze the name, search the archives, etc. Online services are convenient for those who take the issue not very seriously , or to build a simple tree and its design. According to statistics, sites “live” on average up to 5 years and for various reasons can disappear from the information space along with your data.
For more in-depth work on your pedigree, it is best to use special programs from which information can be stored, archived, duplicated and processed on any device and at the same time be independent of the Web. Free programs, for the most part, are very simple, have little functionality and are convenient for simple tree constructions. 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 qualitatively and conveniently. For example, the "Tree of Life" program in the free version has small restrictions, but allows you to get acquainted with its work. The full version costs about 400 rubles. The amount is not very large, but it allows you to think about how seriously you are set to work.
We begin the formation of the tree with ourselves
After the tree construction tool is chosen, the questions arise: how to make a family tree and where to start creating it? The easiest way is to start with yourself. In the program or service, enter information about yourself, then about your immediate environment - about everyone you know personally and about whom you own information. You insert photos of these people from the hard drive or, if they are not there, scan or take photographs of paper portraits from albums. Attach photos, make connections, enter comments (for example, a short biography) until personal knowledge runs out.
We continue to form a tree
The next step is a meeting with relatives. We arrange a meeting with relatives from the necessary "branches" of the tree, we take a cake and a laptop (or rather a voice recorder). During the conversation you can get a lot of information that fills the gaps in the family tree. In this case, you can make a big mistake, not going to relatives, and collecting a large number of them in one place to interview. Usually this leads to the fact that old people correct each other, cannot find agreement on different dates, argue about events and generally bring significant chaos to the harmonious 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 periods, and if they are in a good location, they will be able to use their rare photos in albums.
It will be more convenient to conduct a conversation if, before starting it, draw up a mini-questionnaire for questions 10-15: first and last names, important dates of life (birth, wedding, life events, death), children and parents.
We continue to collect information
After we have collected data from everyone who was nearby, the next step will be communication with those who live far away, in other cities and countries. It is easiest to communicate with them by phone, skype or via social networks. After talking with them, you can question them and briefly tell them how to make a family tree. They themselves can build their twig and send it to you to add it to your big tree. This is very convenient, since it is quite difficult to do such a job 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 as much information as possible is collected .
Work 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 was cut off at some stage and it is not known, for example, whom the great-great-grandfather married to 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 in various archives or databases. Be sure to double-check the information, as often there are namesakes, even full namesakes of people, otherwise your searches may go into other people's "trees".
Family tree construction schemes
When the information is collected, the question arises of how to make a family tree. Layout and layout may vary. The difference in the schemes is the person set 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 still options for how to make a family tree. An example of a standard scheme, the most common, is presented in the figure. The tree is usually built like this: you are located below, your parents are above, then grandparents, etc. The branches expand from the bottom up. Below are the children. Designate yourself as the basis.