How To Make A Family Tree For Free

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Lutgarda Briseno

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Aug 3, 2024, 1:30:20 PM8/3/24

to harpilsgote

I just got a job to do a very large family tree with 170 entries. I would really like to use InDesign but I am struggling to figure out the best way to create all of those little boxes. Has anyone made a family tree with InDesign or does anyone have suggestions on the best way to do it.

If this is a one-off project, then I too would use Family Tree Maker to make the pedigree charts. InDesign is great for most layout purposes, but not in this instance. InDesign can be used for the rest of the project (i.e. tales and anecdotes from the family etc) but the pedigree charts will be easier to do in FTM.

For making lots of boxes, experiment with both Gridify and also Step and Repeat. Delete boxes in the middle that you don't need, and move others over if necessary. A majority of them will fit into a grid.

Thanks for the quick response. I haven't used any of the things you mentioned in InDesign so I would need to play with those. I do use Illustrator, but I am definitely not as good at Illustrator as I am with InDesign.

I always keep changing my mind as to which application is better for creating charts like this. Most recently, I've been creating them in InDesign and I think it's actually easier. Mostly because I like to center the text, top to bottom, in the Frame and you can't easily do that in Illustrator. Beyond that, I think Paragraph and Character Style are far superior in InDesign.

Another point for doing it in InDesign: If I have multiple charts in my InDesign layout, and the charts are Placed from Illustrator, I have to make sure they are all placed at the same scale percentage or the type sizes within the charts will vary from one chart to the next. Creating the charts directly in InDesign, the type will be a consistent size following a Paragraph Style I set up.

Have you ever made a family tree? If so, I'd love to see how you went about it. I have 170 entries to create. We are looking at a 36x48 size page. I am worried about manipulating all these boxes moving them around and the lines connecting them. How did you handle that?

My employer has an application especially made for it that takes a GEDCOM file and transforms it into text that is easier to manipulate in InDesign. This software is not off-the-shelf, it was created by a family tree enthusiast and is a bespoke application. That said, the software is running in DOS and we're looking to find an XML-based solution before the software can no longer run. However, every expert I've asked at the conferences I've attended in the last three years say the same thing when I mention this issue: "What's a GEDCOM file?". If anyone from Ancestry.com is reading this, I'd be interested in a PM.

I am working on a 6 generation fan chart. I have found a really easy way to get started! Use the polar grid tool. Put in the number of concentric rings (for each generation) and the number of radial dividers for the number of ancestors. there are many charts online that will tell you how many ancestors you have for each generation, i.e. 5 generations you have 32 ancestors.Click create compound path. Then select all, Use outline instead of divide, give stroke then ungroup, then click segments and delete the sections you don't need! I went further to duplicate the rings, and make individual paths for each of the name that followed the curve.

The best search results so far for this only yielded examples where a child can only have a parent node. But what I need is the ability to create links between entities (from father to mother) and links between nodes and other links (from child to the father-mother link).Currently I don't have a fixed data schema for this.

The good news: There have been some other people who have looked into this and have found some great starting points! I realize that this is not a complete solution to the entire task at hand, but it seems from your question that a large portion of your difficulty so far has been simply figuring out where to start (e.g. "Tutorials about d3.js only cover standard charts like bar charts."). In the absence of anything better, I will at least respond to that portion here.

First, in the response to this related stackoverflow post from a few years back, inanutshellus provides some great d3 tools that are available and could be of use here. With some light customization/extension, they should be able to get you where you're going relatively quickly. For posterity, inanutshellus's answer is reproduced here:

There are some options, but I believe each would require a bit of work. It would help if there were one single standard for representing a family tree in JSON. I've recently noticed that geni.com has a quite in-depth API for this. Perhaps coding against their API would be a good idea for reusability...

Similar to the Pedigree Tree, but bidirectional, this Bracket Layout Tree lets you handle a "here are my parents, grandparents, children, grandchildren" type view. Like the Pedigree Tree, you'd make individuals linkable to re-center the bracket on that node.

There are some interesting force-based layouts that seem promising. Take a look at this example of a force-based layout with smart labels. An adjustment to the algorithm for how the "force" is determined could make this into a very lovely tree, with older generations above or below newer ones.

The d3.js layouts I've seen that would lend themselves best to family trees assume a single node is the parent, whereas you need to represent the parent as the combination of (visually a "T" between) two nodes: one node that is a member of your tree, and one floating node that represents the in-law. Adjusting a cluster dendogram to do this should be feasible but not without significant modification.

In terms of concrete implementation, mj8591 asked this question regarding a similar family tree with a different problem. However, luckily for you that question includes a fiddle (all the js code) that has most or all the components that you need, and the response from mdml includes another fiddle that adds some more granular "clickability" to each node.

I don't know if this is of any help to you, because you said that you were going to use d3.js but there is another tool that you might want to look into using called jsplumb. It seems perfect for this kind of project: home page. They also have some decent tutorials. There is one more like docs, and another more interactive.

I strongly advise following a properly constructed ID structure for places on the tree. You would need one ascending system and one descending system. Many hypothesised members will prove not to be, or, in the case of many online trees, provably wrong or even internally inconsistent.

Hello @rezedu: I have been doing genealogy on traditional genealogy tools such as Family Tree Maker and Roots Magic for several years. Over that time I have accumulated data on several thousand profiles for people in the tree, some of them going back a thousand years. I think it is too complex to just try and convert all of that data to Obsidian notes. HOWEVER, the traditional genealogy tools are poorly suited to constructing stories or narratives for a family history. They lack two important ingredients to a history: context, and (supporting) characters. The context in a history has to cover developments in technology and life to show the external events that affect everyone. The other characters are generally known as Friends, Associates, and Neighbors (or the FAN club). These characters also influence history, but they are not connected to the family tree by any family relationship. Genealogy tools are useless for tracking and organizing these parts of a history, while Obsidian is more flexibly structured to allow these to be added to the database.

Not only that, there are so many issues from the multiple variations in GEDCOM that after my last attempt at migrating from one program to another I promised myself that I would never store anything of my tree in something other than text plain files. This is actually long-term much more likely to be useful to other people too!

I have started to use a couple of Obsidian templates for genealogy profiles. One template is given below. I use meta-data with YAML for the basic genealogy data values (names, dates, places), and then text for any history details, such as obits or newspaper stories.

It might be nice to have some kind of Obsidian tool to convert GEDCOM text files to Obsidian notes, but this is probably going a step too far at this time. GEDCOM is now about 3 decades old, and it has several limitations that will never be corrected. Perhaps a better thought is some sort of tool to convert WikiTree profiles to Obsidian notes. WikiTree can borrow genealogy data from FamilySearch, and it is free and open on the internet. WT also follows a fairly consistent format for each profile.

Click simple commands and SmartDraw builds your family tree for you, automatically. Add or remove a box and SmartDraw will realign and arrange all the elements so that everything continues to look great. No need for manual adjustment. Just focus on building your family tree.

Share your family tree with other family members. They can help you build it or share their input in comments. You can also share your tree with anyone who doesn't own SmartDraw by emailing them a link.