Free family tree template, ready to print.
Print this free family tree template and fill it in by hand: you, your parents, your four grandparents and your eight great-grandparents, on one letter-size page. There's no account and no email to give. Start with yourself, write what you know in pencil, and ask the oldest relative you have about the blanks.
How to fill it in.
- Start with yourself in the box on the left. Genealogists call this a pedigree chart, and it always reads from one person back.
- Work back one generation at a time. On each pair, the father goes on the top line and the mother on the bottom.
- Use a woman's maiden name, the name she was born with. It's the name her parents will be found under.
- Write dates like 12 Mar 1891, so nobody mixes up the day and the month.
- Write "about" when you're guessing, and use a pencil. A guess you marked is still useful.
Rather type it?
Our free family tree maker does the same four generations on screen, and you can print it or download it as a GEDCOM file.
Need more room?
Print one family group sheet (PDF) for each couple. It holds both parents and all their children, which the chart leaves out.
Making one for school?
Every family is shaped differently. Adopted, step and blended families all belong on the page, so write the family the child knows and add lines where it needs them.
Stuck on a name?
Ask the oldest relative you have, then look for anything with a name and a date on it. How to find your great-grandparents goes step by step, and a death certificate usually names a person's parents.
Yours may already be drawn.
FamilySearch Family Tree is one family tree that everyone shares, and it's free to use. Someone in your family may already have started yours. Sign in, and Ancestral Fire brings it in and draws it as a fan chart with the source behind each person.
Or just ask.
Tell Ancestral Fire one name, and it reads your tree, searches FamilySearch Family Tree once you connect it, and tells you what it found, with the source behind each fact. A real answer:
I'm Eunice Kennedy. I'd like to know about my dad's father, Patrick Joseph Kennedy.
We'll start with what you know, then look for public records for relatives who have passed away. I added Eunice Kennedy as the center of your tree and noted Patrick Joseph Kennedy as your dad's father.
A new account's first answer: one name is enough to start.
See a whole conversation on How it works, or what it finds in one family: The Kennedy family tree, from Wexford to Dallas.
Keep reading.
- What does my last name mean?. Most English-language last names began in one of four ways: a father's name (Johnson), a job (Smith), a place (Hill) or a nickname (Brown).
- How to find an old obituary, free. Start with FamilySearch, which is free and has obituary collections, then try Chronicling America, the Library of Congress collection of free newspaper pages through 1963.