How to make a family tree

You can make your tree yourself, without paying anything, starting from what you already know. Here are the steps in the order that pays off most, from your own name all the way back to 19th-century registers.

1. Start with yourself

Take a sheet of paper or a printable family tree template, and put yourself at the bottom. Above you, your two parents, then your four grandparents, then your eight great-grandparents. Four generations, fifteen people, that's a complete first tree.

For each person, write down what you already know.

• Last name and first names, with the birth name for married women.
• Date and town of birth, even approximate.
• Date and town of marriage.
• Date and town of death, if applicable.

Write what you're sure of in pen and what you're not sure of in pencil. And note where each piece of information comes from ("told by my mother", "family record book"). Six months from now, that's what will save you from searching twice.

The most useful detail for what comes next isn't the date, it's the town. Records are filed by town, and without it you don't know where to look.

2. Talk to the family, oldest first

Older relatives know things that aren't written down anywhere. A great-grandmother's maiden name, the village a grandfather came from, a second marriage nobody talks about. Start with them, the registers will still be there.

Go see them with your half-filled sheet. Showing the gaps gets people talking more easily than a general question. Ask above all for places and years, even to within ten years. Put a phone on the table and record, you'll listen better than if you take notes, and the voice will stay. The guide telling your family's story has questions that work.

3. Gather the papers and photos

Every household in the family keeps a box or a drawer. Ask to see what's inside. The documents that move you forward most are often these.

• The family record book (in France, the livret de famille), which gives the names, dates and places of birth of the spouses and the births of the children.
• Birth, marriage and death announcements, and obituaries cut out of the newspaper.
• Military booklets, which give the date and place of birth and often the parents' names.
• Notarial deeds (estates, sales, marriage contracts), which name a whole set of siblings at once.
• Postcards and letters, for addresses and first names.
• Photos, especially those with a name or a date on the back.

You don't need to take the originals. Photograph each document flat, in daylight, and note whose house it's in. For photos, the guide family tree with photos explains how to digitize and caption them.

4. Request recent records from the town hall

In France, civil records (état civil) for grandparents and great-grandparents are often still held at the town hall (mairie). Birth and marriage registers only become open to everyone 75 years after they are closed. But a descendant doesn't have to wait.

• You can obtain at any time the full copy of the birth or marriage record of your parents, grandparents and great-grandparents, because you are their descendant.
• A death record can be requested by anyone, without giving a reason.
• The request goes to the town hall of the town where the record was made, in person, by mail or online on service-public.gouv.fr.

Always ask for the full copy (copie intégrale) rather than an extract. It's the one that gives the parents' names, and so the next generation.

5. Go further back in the departmental archives

After 75 years, French registers leave the town halls for the departmental or municipal archives. Almost every département has digitized them, and registers more than 100 years old can be viewed online, for free, on the website of the département's archives. FranceArchives keeps the list of civil registration collections online.

There is no national search engine by name. Registers are filed by town, then by year. Hence the importance of the town you noted in step 1.

• Start with the ten-year indexes (tables décennales), lists of names drawn up every ten years since 1792 for each town. They give the exact date of the record.
• Then open the register for that year, at the date given.
• The marriage record is the richest. It gives the age or date of birth of the spouses, where they came from and the names of their parents. With it, you gain a whole generation at once.
• Before 1792, there are the parish registers (baptisms, marriages, burials), kept by the priest. They rarely come with indexes, so you have to read year by year.

Two resources complement the records. The FranceArchives name database compiles the censuses from 1836 to 1936 and the military service registers from 1867 to 1925, with a search by name. And the trees already published on Geneanet or FamilySearch, free to browse, where someone may already have traced a branch. Check against the record before copying.

6. Choose a format, paper, software or online

Each format has its use, and many families combine two.

Paper. A printable template is perfect to get started, to work with an older relative around a table, or to give as a gift. It doesn't hold up well beyond four or five generations, and it isn't easy to correct.

Desktop software. It keeps everything on your computer, handles thousands of people and produces printable reports. It's the tool for people who research for a long time. To share it, you have to export.

An online tree. It opens from any device and can be shared with the family. Some tools are built to search for ancestors in the archives, others to keep what the family knows about itself. The comparison which family tree app to choose goes through them one by one.

The GEDCOM format, read by most of these tools, lets you move from one to another without typing everything in again.

7. Share it, so the family can fill it in

A tree made alone stops at what you know. Send it out. A cousin will correct a date, an aunt will find the missing photo, an uncle will remember the name of the village. The sooner the tree gets around, the faster it fills up.

It's also the moment to go beyond dates. For grandchildren, a name and two years say very little. Add photos and recordings as they come in, on the right person's page.

Where Parenthèse fits in

Parenthèse doesn't search for records in the archives. It's for keeping what you gathered in steps 2, 3 and 7. Each person in the tree carries their photos, their videos, recordings of their voice and the stories people tell about them.

You share the tree with a link, and the family views it without creating an account. With the contribution password, they suggest additions and corrections, which you approve. Parenthèse is free, and it imports and exports GEDCOM, so you can start from a tree begun somewhere else.

Frequently asked questions