A family tree can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be.
A simple genealogy chart may include you, your parents, your grandparents, and your great-grandparents. A complicated family tree chart may include you, your parents, your siblings, aunts and uncles, cousins, and so on.
How far you go and who you include is up to you.
Basic Understanding before starting your Tree
Before you jump in and start drawing your family tree, you may want to do a little planning. For example, you might ask yourself:
You also may want to determine in which direction you will draw the tree. In nature, trees grow from the ground to the sky, but on paper or the computer screen, family trees can develop from the bottom up, the top down, or horizontally. It could be a good idea to look at some examples of family trees to help you decide how your tree will be drawn.
There is not a single family tree definition that dictates what has to be included or what the family tree should look like. But note that if you simply want to chart relationships without digging too deeply, you may draw a simple family tree and represent relationships to help you visualize your lineage.
Write down what you know, ask family members to fill in the gaps, and find pictures and documents. Enquire with your elders, scan through your family albums and try other online genealogy sources to search for census records, news stories, land deeds, and other documents that can verify your ancestry.
Remember that you can only go back so far because of the limited availability of reliable records. It is very hard to find accurate records older than a few hundred years because many records have been destroyed in fires, floods, acts of war, and simple negligence. Some areas of the world were better at keeping and preserving records than others, so how far you can go back will depend on how much of your family records you are able to trace. Most family tree outlines trace ancestry back three or four generations because of the limited information.
Compile all of the information you have and create an outline. Start drawing from yourself to your ancestors, or start with the oldest ancestor you know about and trace forward to you
Family Tree - Basic Genealogy
Genealogy Chart Example
Each family member will be represented by a shape connected by lines to represent relationships. Typically a box or rectangle is used to represent your relatives, but you can use any shape that you want to use. Each shape is a leaf on the tree. The shape you decide to use as leaves should be consistent and sized to include the information that you plan to put on your family tree chart.
Place pictures, important event dates, and any other information you want to include in your leaf. As you put together this information, we would recommend a few additional guidelines:
If you want your family tree diagram to be useful to other members of your family, keep it simple so the information can be easily scanned and digested. Try to have each level of the tree represent a single generation so it is easy to trace relationships.
Who is going to be looking at this family tree diagram? There may be some family secrets that are not known to all living family members, so try to be sensitive about adding information that may not be too welcome to some of your relatives.
Getting Started
For finding out the steps to start a tree in Famili Vistas, refer the document on Getting Started in Famili Vistas