Heritage Album

How do I go about making an accurate, neat, and organized family tree?

I am doing a speech in class called the American Dream Speech and I am doing a family tree. Has anyone made a family tree before that can give me tips? What people do I put on? My immediate aunts and uncles/cousins and then grandparents as far as I can go? Help!

Public Comments

1. The first thing to do is the go to this website http://www.cs.williams.edu/~bailey/genealogy/ print out the family group sheet (or 5 or 10) and fill them out for ever person in your family starting with your parents and their parents and their parents, and brother/sisters of all of them. That will give you your basic information. print out the Pedigree Chart and start filling it out with your parents, their parents, and so on - this gives you ancestry at a glance After you get the informaton that you already have done you can start looking for more online using the USGenWeb www.usgenweb.org you can search for information nationally, by state and county. If you get stuck feel free to email me, I have been doing for years. PS - You can also download a program called Legacy free (www.legacyfamilytree.com) where you can just type in what you know and it will make all of the forms for you already Stephanie
2. Oddly enough, we rarely draw "trees" with trunks and branches. We use computer programs these days. In the old days we used pencil and paper to fill in pedigree charts and Family Group Sheets. You can draw something pretty but unscientific if you put one set of grandparents on the trunk of your tree. You will have to pick which set, Mom's parents or dad's parents, or draw two trees. Make a large branch with a round clump of leaves coming out of the top of the trunk for each of their children. Write their names on the clump of leaves. Write "m. John Smith" or whoever they married under their name. Then repeat; from each large branch with a clump of leaves, draw as many more small branches and clumps as each couple had children. Write names on those clumps too. The small clumps that come out of your parents' clump will have you and your brothers and sisters. The small branches that come out of your aunts and uncles will have your first cousins. Now, if you had a roll of butcher paper 100 feet long, an HP plotter and 500 hours of research, you could start earlier and have many more branches; the "trunk" could be one set of your 3rd great grandparents, and your tree would be a very short, very wide "Family Shrub". For the "just the grandparents" tree, start by listing all of your brothers, sisters and first cousins. That will tell you how many of the top level clumps you will need. You can make them an arch instead of straight across the top of the paper.
3. The easiest way is to go to http://www.familysearch.org and download the PAF program. It's free and fairly simple to use. Fill in yourself, your siblings, your parents and grandparents (and maybe great grandparents, aunt's uncles, cousins, nieces, and nephews if you know and want to) in the forms. Once you have the information in the database there's a variety of reports you can print and you can include detail to the level you're interested in. Reports can also be made into jpgs if you'd like to put the info in a Power Point.