How does one make a family tree for a messed up family?
How do you make a visible family tree (you know, like one that can go in a book) where there are so many divorces, remarriages and children from different parents.
Basically, how can I make a family tree with multiple spouses and multiple children from the multiple spouses? Thank you!
Tagged with: family tree • parents • remarriages
Filed under: Ideas For Family Tree Project
The good news is, each of those children has 1 set of birth parents.
I use Family Tree Maker software and Ancestry.com, and both of those handle these issues very well.
Please note that the kind of tree you’re wanting to publish will dictate who is actually displayed on the tree. Let’s say you’re doing a descendant tree of one of your direct ancestors. You and your spouse and any kids you have had would show up. But let’s say you have a female cousin (also a direct descendant of the person you’re doing a descendant tree from), who has been married 4 times. She would show up in the descendant tree, and so would each of her husbands, as would the kids she had in all 4 marriages.
If that female cousin’s first husband has also been married 4 times, his history won’t show up in that tree, because he will only show up once as a husband of your female cousin.
In other words, the type of tree and the primary person in that tree determine which individuals will be included in the actual tree.
The ancestry trees and descendant trees are "off-the-shelf" reports that you can create with the click of a couple buttons in Family Tree Maker. And you don’t have to worry about who’s a blood relative OR how many times anyone has been married or divorced!
I hope this helps!
If you would like help with it you can try a website like http://www.ancestry.com
Ancestry.com prices:
Annual US Deluxe subscription: $155.00.
Quarterly US Deluxe subscription: $50.85
Monthly US Deluxe subscription: $19.95.
The annual subscription saves you about $6.50 per month over the monthly price.
An annual subsciption to Ancestry.com will give you access to the publishing section.
First, you will need to create a family tree, listing family members of your choice.
Ancestry gives you plenty of space to add multiple marriages and the children from each of those marriages.
My 3rd great-granfather was married 3 x’s. His 3rd wife was his oldest sons widow; she had 6 children by the son and 4 by the father. If that’s not messed up, I don’t know what is! Ancestry handled that very easily, so I know it will handle your family, as well.
After you have all of the names and info you want in your tree, you can create a book in the publishing section.
When you have the layout of the book to your liking, you simply pay for the book. The number of pages determines the price. Ancestry will put it together for you and ship it to you.
Their published books look very professional and the cost is far less then conventional publishing.
If you do not wish to purchase their book, you can print a copy of the pages you have created in the publishing section and put them in a store-bought binder of your choice. The total number of pages you print per day is limited and it only prints on one side of the paper.
The task of keeping up with the living family members is too difficult, when you are considering publishing.
Living family members are included in my tree, but not in my published books. I only published from my grandparents back to the earliest Colonist/immigrant to the US, of 4 lines.
As a subscriber, you will also have access to Census, birth, death, marriage, military records, as well as, other subscribers family trees.
My paid subscription to Ancestry is worth every single penny.
You’re wanting to put it all on paper, not have it on the computer. I would suggest getting a couple of sheets of A3 paper and doing a rough sketch of the tree first of all. You will then see the spacing issues you may have, and know to give a certain side of the family more space for their multiple marriages and what not.
You may need to draw it out a couple of times before you have it how you want it, and remember to use the same symbols throughout the tree. For example, I use a ruler to draw lines between generations so that it’s clear, and use an equals sign (=) to show the spouse of someone. or example:
John William Smith = Susan May Hyatt
Include only the names if you wish, but you can also include birth, marriage and death dates if you have space. If you Google "family tree" in images, you might come up with a few examples you could copy.
This one is a good example - http://www.lukemastin.com/diary/bible_family_tree.gif
This one is just the immediate line - http://www.affordablehousinginstitute.org/blogs/us/family_tree_small.jpg
You can find family tree charts here. Simply save it and print it off - http://www.freefamilytreecharts.com/
It may help to understand the basics of genealogy. The number one goal is normally to TRACE YOUR ANCESTRY. The ancestors are people who YOU DESCEND from, such as parents, grandparents, so forth. If you were doing that.. the title of the book might be "ancestry of Jane Smith". Since Jane Smith doesn’t descend from her aunt’s 2nd husband or his brother/cousins…. the 2nd husband does not fit the format of the research.
Another popular format is the descendants or John Smith and Jane Jones (who might be one set of your gr gr grandparents). Ok.. so, for doing this angle.. you determine each of their children, grandchildren, and their spouses. Thus.. if their daughter Mary Smith married Joe Blank, and Joe has children from his prior marriage.. the children from the prior marriage are NOT actually grandchildren from John and Jane. They are step children, but not a descendent in fact.
The trick to any of this is that you have to choose the format you want, and evaluate who actually belongs in that format. If you are trying to be friendly and include anyone remotely involved, that is not standard.. and you’ll have to design something from scratch. There is no standard format if you attempt to include step children (who technically are not descendants, even though they are part of the family.
What you CAN DO is download a free program like PAF (www.familysearch.org), which is a database, and can contain any persons you choose to maintain. It can be used for different families in a county, for example. It will only show a factual relationship, if one exists..but you can keep track of all the marriages, remarriages, so forth. It will print charts for books, but on standard formats.
My personal observation… I don’t reccommend trying to "come down" style of research (keeping track of all present living people in a family). It becomes overwhelming, and the people KEEP CHANGING. The benefit to "purist" genealogy (tracing ancestry backwards) is that the people are all dead, they have had all the marriages and children that they plan to, and there is a beginning and end to the data. I tried to warn one group about the effort to have a book with "everyone wants to be in the book".. 15 yrs later, the book has never been published. HUGE mistake.