Family Tree Template: Which Chart to Use, How to Fill It In, and Where the Records Are

Everybody hands you a blank chart and walks away

Search for a family tree template and you will get a hundred usable results in about four seconds. Canva has one. FamilySearch has several. The National Genealogical Society, the National Archives, Vertex42, half of Pinterest. They are free, they are fine, and they all stop at exactly the same place: here is your empty grid, good luck.

Which is a shame, because the blank chart was never the obstacle. Genealogy is routinely described as the second most popular hobby in the United States, and roughly 35 million people have now taken a consumer DNA test hoping it will tell them something about where they came from. That is a very large number of people who have downloaded a family tree template, filled in four or five boxes from memory, hit a name they cannot place, and quietly closed the file.

This guide covers the three things the template sites leave out. Which chart shape to use for what you are actually trying to do. Where the missing dates genuinely come from, which for anyone working further back than living memory means death records. And what to do with the tree once it is full, so that it outlives the laptop it was built on. That last one is closer to our own work than it might sound: at Linkora we spend a lot of time on what happens to a family’s story after the person holding it is gone.

The five shapes a family tree template comes in

Almost every chart you will ever download is one of five structures. They are not interchangeable, and choosing between them is a decision about direction: are you going backwards in time, forwards, or both.

The pedigree chart, also called an ancestor chart

One person on the left, their two parents branching right, then four grandparents, then eight great-grandparents. Every generation doubles. This is the shape most people picture when they hear the phrase, and it is the standard four or five generation form.

Its strength is also its limit. A pedigree chart only shows direct ancestors, so your grandmother appears but her sister does not, and neither do your own siblings. Five generations means 31 boxes and fits comfortably on one page. Seven generations means 127 boxes and does not.

The descendant chart

The mirror image. Start with one ancestor or one couple at the top and fan downwards through every child, every spouse, every grandchild. This is the chart you want for a family reunion, because it is the only one where most of the people in the room appear.

It is also the harder chart to complete honestly. Ancestry is a straight line and you either find the record or you do not. Descendants multiply sideways, and the further down you go, the more likely you are to be missing a cousin nobody stayed in touch with.

The hourglass chart

Ancestors above, descendants below, one person at the pinch point. Useful when you are building something centred on a specific individual, which is exactly the case when you are assembling a memorial and want to show a person in their full context rather than as a name and two dates.

The fan chart

The same information as a pedigree chart, bent into a semicircle or a full circle. This is a presentation format rather than a working one. What it does unusually well is make the shape of your research visible at a glance: paternal side on one half, maternal on the other, and every gap in your knowledge shows up as an obvious blank wedge. People frame these. Nobody fills one in by hand while squinting at a census page.

The family group sheet

Not a tree at all, and the one experienced researchers actually live in. One sheet per nuclear family: the husband, the wife, their marriage, and every child with birth, marriage and death details, plus space to cite where each fact came from. Charts show relationships. Group sheets hold evidence. You need both, and if you only ever download one family tree template you will eventually find yourself writing dates in the margin because there was nowhere else to put them.

Choosing by what you are actually making

The chart type follows from the purpose, and there are really only three purposes.

Something to hang on a wall. A reunion poster, a wedding gift, a print for a grandparent. You want a fan chart or a wide descendant chart, you want it to look good more than you want it to be exhaustive, and you should accept in advance that it will be out of date within a year. Aim for four generations, not seven.

A working research document. Pedigree chart as your index, family group sheets underneath it, and a citation next to every date. This one is ugly on purpose. If you are doing this seriously you will eventually move it into software, at which point see the section on GEDCOM below.

A record of one person, in context. This is the case when someone has died and you are trying to hold on to who they were rather than build a database. An hourglass chart works, but honestly a chart alone is a thin thing to leave behind. Names and dates are the skeleton. The photographs, the voice, the stories that only three people know are the part worth preserving, which is why what goes on a memorial page tends to matter more to families than the accuracy of the fourth generation.

The numbering system nobody explains

Ahnentafel is a German word meaning ancestor table, and it is the single most useful thing in genealogy that most people using a family tree template have never heard of. The system is sometimes called Sosa-Stradonitz, after the Spanish genealogist Jerome de Sosa who used it in 1676 and the German genealogist Stephan Kekule von Stradonitz who popularised it in an atlas published in 1896.

The rule is one line long. You are number 1. Your father is 2, your mother is 3. From there, a person’s father is double their number, and their mother is double their number plus one.

A useful side effect: apart from number 1, every even number is male and every odd number is female. So if you see a reference to “ancestor 47” you already know, without a chart, that she is a woman five generations back on the maternal side of your paternal grandmother’s line.

The reason this matters practically is that Ahnentafel numbers survive formats. You can put them in an email, a spreadsheet, a text message or a shared document. No diagram required, no software, nothing to become obsolete. When a cousin sends you a list of forty names and numbers, you can reconstruct the entire chart from it.

Getting the labels right: greats, and cousins removed

Two conventions cause more arguments at family gatherings than anything else on a chart.

Greats. Your grandparent’s parent is your great-grandparent. Their parent is your great-great-grandparent. Beyond about three greats most researchers switch to numbered form, so great-great-great-grandmother becomes third great-grandmother. Both are correct. Pick one and use it consistently across the whole tree, because mixing them is how duplicate people end up in a database.

Cousins. The number tells you how far back the shared ancestor is. First cousins share grandparents. Second cousins share great-grandparents. Third cousins share great-great-grandparents. The shortcut: count the greats in the shared ancestor’s title and add one.

Removed. This is the one everybody gets wrong. “Removed” has nothing to do with distance and everything to do with generational level. It means the two of you sit different numbers of generations away from that shared ancestor. Your second cousin’s child is your second cousin once removed. So is your parent’s second cousin. Twice removed means a two generation gap, which is why the term covers both your grandparents’ generation and your grandchildren’s.

Filling it in: where the dates actually come from

Here is the part the template sites skip entirely. A family tree template is a container. The research is the work, and past living memory almost all of it comes from records generated by death.

Start with the people who are still here

This is genuinely urgent and almost everyone leaves it too late. Oral history, family nicknames, which brother emigrated first, why the surname spelling changed, where the family Bible ended up: none of this is written down anywhere. It exists in the memory of the oldest people in your family and it disappears entirely when they do.

Record the conversations. Ask about places and relationships rather than dates, because people remember houses and arguments far better than they remember years. If you want structure for this, the prompts in a guided journal work surprisingly well for interviewing a relative, not just for grief.

Vital records

Birth, marriage and death certificates are the backbone. A death certificate in particular is one of the densest documents in genealogy, because it usually names the deceased’s parents, including the mother’s maiden name, which is often the single fact that unlocks the next generation back. It also gives you a place of burial. If you have never requested one, the process varies by state and is more straightforward than people expect: we cover it in how to get a death certificate.

The census

United States census records are released to the public 72 years after collection. The 1950 census came out on 1 April 2022 and is free at the National Archives, searchable by name or browsable by enumeration district. That is currently the most recent one available. The 1960 census is scheduled for April 2032, so if your gap sits between 1950 and 1960, no amount of searching will close it yet.

Obituaries and funeral ephemera

An obituary is a genealogist’s gift: it lists surviving relatives by name and relationship, which is often the only place a daughter-in-law or a stepchild appears in the record at all. Finding older ones takes a bit of technique, covered in tracking down an obituary for a specific person. Knowing how they are conventionally structured also helps you read between the lines, which is a side benefit of understanding how obituaries are written.

Do not overlook the paper that families keep in drawers. A funeral guest book is a signed, dated list of everyone in a person’s circle on one specific day. Memorial cards carry exact dates. Both are primary sources that never make it into any database.

Cemeteries and headstones

Find a Grave holds more than 226 million memorials across roughly 564,000 cemeteries, all viewable free and largely built by volunteers photographing stones. BillionGraves and Interment.net cover similar ground, and FamilySearch indexes a great deal of it.

The stone itself is a record, and often a richer one than the index entry made from it. Inscriptions name relationships, military service, causes and beliefs, and the physical arrangement of a family plot tells you who was considered family. Reading a worn one is a skill in itself, and it is worth knowing how to clean a headstone safely before you touch anything, because the wrong method destroys the very inscription you came to read. Our guides to headstone inscriptions and the various types of grave marker go further into what the stone can tell you, and there is a plain-language glossary of funeral and cemetery terms for the vocabulary you will hit in old records.

Five chart shapes, what each one shows, and where the dates come from.

Where to get a free family tree template

All of these are genuinely free and none of them require an account to print:

• FamilySearch publishes printable pedigree charts, fan charts and family group sheets. Free, non-commercial, and the group sheets are properly designed with source fields.
• The National Genealogical Society offers free charts and forms aimed at people doing real research rather than crafts.
• The US National Archives hosts standard genealogy charts and forms alongside its record collections.
• Canva, Vertex42, Creately and SmartDraw cover the decorative end. Better looking, editable in a browser, weaker on research fields.
• Word, Google Docs and Excel all have workable options, either built in or as community templates. Fine for a five generation pedigree chart, painful beyond that.

Honestly, the source matters far less than the shape. Any family tree template with the right structure will do. What will cause you grief is downloading a decorative four generation chart when the job in front of you needed group sheets.

GEDCOM: getting your tree out of whatever you built it in

At some point a paper family tree template stops scaling. When it does, the thing to understand before you commit to any software is GEDCOM.

GEDCOM stands for Genealogical Data Communication. It was created by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in 1984 as a way for different genealogy programs to exchange data, and it became the de facto standard because there was never a serious competitor. A GEDCOM file is a plain text file, usually with a .ged extension, containing individuals, families, events and the links between them.

Two versions matter. GEDCOM 5.5.1, dating from 1999 and formally finalised in 2019, is still the most widely supported version in practice. FamilySearch GEDCOM 7.0 was released in 2021 after an industry-wide effort that concluded in May of that year. It adds zip packaging so photographs and documents can travel with the data instead of separately, expands notes, and standardises on UTF-8 encoding, which quietly fixes decades of mangled accented surnames. Version 7.0 can import older files.

What happens to the tree when you are gone

This is the question no family tree template asks, and it is the one that decides whether any of the work mattered.

Genealogical research has a bleak failure pattern. One person in a family becomes the keeper. They spend fifteen years on it. The research lives on their computer, in a program nobody else in the family has, in a format nobody else recognises, and when they die the whole thing goes into a box in a garage or straight into a skip. Archivists and genealogical societies see this constantly.

Digital storage does not solve it on its own. Formats become obsolete, drives fail, cloud accounts lapse when the card on file expires, and files are trivially easy to delete by accident. Paper has the opposite problem: it survives neglect well but does not survive a flood, and only one person can hold it at a time.

What the professionals actually recommend is unglamorous and effective:

• Keep three copies in at least two formats and two locations. One of them should be somewhere that is not your house.
• Deposit a copy with an institution. Local historical societies, county genealogical societies and libraries in the area your ancestors lived will often accept researched family histories, and they have a mandate to keep things.
• Export GEDCOM regularly and store the .ged alongside PDFs of your charts, so the data survives even if the software does not.
• Write an inventory of what exists and where, in plain language, and leave it somewhere a relative will find it. This overlaps almost entirely with a digital legacy checklist and with the account-access questions in a proper end of life planning checklist.
• Name a successor while you can still teach them. Handing over a hard drive is not a handover. Showing somebody how the files are organised is.

The same logic applies to the physical side of a family’s history. If you are the person going through a parent’s house, the photographs and documents you are sorting are the raw material of everyone else’s future research, which is worth remembering before anything gets thrown out. Both Swedish death cleaning and the practical sequence in what to do when a parent dies touch on this from the other direction.

Connecting the tree to the place people actually visit

There is one more gap worth naming. A completed family tree template is a set of names and dates. A grave is a physical location that descendants return to. For most families these two things never meet, and a visitor standing at a headstone gets a name, two years and nothing else.

This is the problem Linkora was built for. A memorial page holds the photographs, the recordings, the written stories and the family connections in one place, and a QR code etched into the monument links the two, so anyone standing at the grave can reach the full record without needing an app. Family tree data can be imported directly via GEDCOM, which means the structure you have spent months building does not have to be retyped.

More than 500 families now use Linkora, with over 12,000 photographs preserved and 98% caretaker satisfaction. Everything is privacy-first: families keep complete control over what is visible and to whom.

If you want to see the shape of it before committing anything, what a digital memorial actually is is the plain explanation, how QR codes on headstones work covers the physical side, and the memorial examples show finished pages. There is also an honest comparison of the platforms in this space if you would rather evaluate the options side by side. Monument dealers, funeral homes and cemeteries adding this as a service should start with the partner information for monument dealers.

Where to start this week

If the chart in front of you has been stuck for a while, this is the order that unsticks it.

1. Print one blank pedigree chart and one family group sheet. Not five. Fill the pedigree from memory only, and mark every gap with a question mark rather than guessing.
2. Call the oldest relative who will talk to you. Record it with permission. Ask about houses, jobs and disagreements, not dates.
3. Pick one gap and order one death certificate. The parents’ names on it, especially the mother’s maiden name, usually move you a full generation back.
4. Search Find a Grave and FamilySearch for that person’s burial. Note the cemetery, then look at who is buried around them.
5. Search the 1950 census free at the National Archives for anyone alive then, and work backwards decade by decade.
6. Write the source next to every fact as you enter it. Every time, no exceptions.
7. Decide now who inherits this and where the second copy lives. Do it while the project is small, because you will not do it later.

None of it is fast. But a family tree template filled in carefully, with sources, and stored somewhere it can be found, is one of the few things a person can make that gets more valuable every year after they are gone. That is a reasonable definition of remembering somebody well.

Frequently asked questions