Who Do You Want to Include in Your Family Chart?

When starting a family history chart project, it’s easy to get distracted by the fun design choices—like picking the perfect background color, fancy borders, or heavyweight archival paper. But before you get lost in font choices, there’s one big question you need to answer: Who is actually making the cut onto this giant chart?

Deciding the scope of your chart—whether you’re highlighting your direct ancestors, showing off a squad of descendants, or unleashing the full chaos of your extended family tree—is the ultimate first step. Choosing your focal person or root couple naturally determines which chart layout will best showcase your family story (and hide any mystery cousins you're still trying to verify!).

Matching Your Scope to the Right Chart Layout

Different genealogy layouts are designed to highlight specific branches of your family story. Understanding how these formats organize your data will help you pick the perfect frame for your hard-earned research.

1. Ancestor Charts: Tracing Your Heritage Backwards

• Who it includes: You (or a featured couple), working straight backward through parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, and those ancestors who somehow survived without indoor plumbing.
• Best layout formats: Left-to-Right Pedigree, Bottom-to-Top, Bowtie (great for showing two married lines coming together), Fan, or Circle style.
• Why choose it: Ideal for celebrating direct lineages, honoring a milestone anniversary couple, or visually bragging about how many brick walls you’ve smashed through. They make stunning centerpiece artwork for living rooms and studies.
• Direct Line option: Lasers in on a single straight-line path connecting you directly to a specific historical figure, Mayflower passenger, or reputed royal ancestor (even if the royalty claim is still pending research!).

2. Descendant Charts: Highlighting Family Branches

• Who it includes: A set of founding ancestors or a patriarch/matriarch, fanning forward to show every child, grandchild, and great-grandchild spawned from that original branch.
• Best layout formats: Top-to-Bottom (horizontal rollout), Top-to-Bottom Wrapped (multi-row layout for huge families), or Left-to-Right (vertical rollout).
• Why choose it: The ultimate crowd-pleaser for family reunions, milestone anniversaries, or proving to everyone at Thanksgiving exactly how they are related to Great-Aunt Edna.

3. All-In-One & Extended Family Charts: Bringing Everyone Together

• Who it includes: Literally everyone in your software file! Ancestors, descendants, aunts, uncles, third cousins twice removed, in-laws, step-relations, and that one guy nobody can quite explain.
• Best layout formats: Extended Family Working Charts (featuring clever connecting lines and offset boxes) or Custom All-in-One Masterpieces.
• Why choose it: It’s the ultimate showstopper at events. Family members will crowd around for hours pointing, laughing, finding their names, and tracing the wild web of connections.

Custom Design Means No Family Member Is Left Behind

Real family trees rarely look like neat, symmetrical textbook diagrams. Families get messy—and that’s what makes them wonderful! You might need to include stepchildren, represent multiple marriages, highlight adoptive lines, or preserve a double surname without breaking your tree layout.

At Family Chartmasters, our core belief is simple: we can design anything. Really.

Whether you want a sleek automated printout or decide to work one-on-one with a personal chart designer, you are never boxed in by off-the-shelf software limits. We can manually bend lines, craft custom branches, create decorative callout notes, or color-code lineages so that every single family member is proudly and accurately represented.

Ready to Bring Your Family Story Out of the Computer?

All those late-night census deep dives and record searches deserve to be seen, shared, and cheered on by the people you love!

• Need a spark of inspiration? Explore our Family Chartmasters Gallery to view real-life examples of ancestor, descendant, fan, and all-in-one charts.
• Got a complex or unique tree? Schedule a free consultation with our friendly design team today. We’ll examine your file, answer your questions, and help you select the ideal layout to turn your research into an incredible family treasure.