Family History and Family Tree?

A key part of representing your Family history is your family tree. Our award winning Family Tree will surprise you with its flexibility. It has unique controls allowing you to easily navigate, invite family members to join or link to each node, search and match against other trees inside or outside of arcalife and rapidly build out your family history.

The basics of family tree terminology used when making a pedigree chart from your family history are relatively straight forward. Each family member in the tree is often referred to as a node. A solid line in the family tree represents a direct relationship between a parent and child or a sibling. A dotted line usually denotes an indirect or ex relationship such as ex-spouse. In addition to the family tree diagram itself a number of abbreviations are sometimes used by family history experts. In the arcalife family tree some of these are displayed and some are contained within the profile itself to avoid unnecessarily overcrowding the tree. (B )Born (D) died, (M) married, [1,2] first or second marriage. If you wish to display these, this can be achieved by adding them in brackets to the displayed profile fields.

Each Family Tree node is linked to the family history files of an ancestor or living relative. This means that you can research family history from within the family tree and add records or certificates directly to the life archives.
When you first start building your family tree, keeping it on paper might seem like a good idea - however it quickly becomes unwieldy so we suggest you keep a paper copy which you can annotate and carry with you on any visits to family or outings to archives, libraries or other family history institutions, but move any verified sections on line as soon as possible. That way you can print and reprint using arcalife’s free family tree print capability. You can print the whole tree or just sections, easily without having to manually re-draw each time. If you realise there is an error in your family history research and have to track back, the arcalife family tree is very flexible and will allow you to make any adjustments that you need to as you go, without having to completely restructure your tree.

As you move back in time the number of ancestors you are tracing will continue to double so it’s important to use tools to help you stay organised – otherwise you’ll have loads of great family history but you wont be able to relate to it. In general drawing out your tree helps to draw out the gaps in your family history, but it’s important to remember that at some point you are likely to head down the wrong path and plan to leave a trail that you can track back in case you hit a ‘Family History dead end’.

For living family members you can send each a family history invite to your tree. Involving your family and collaborating may open up other lines of research or you may find more distant family who want to link up with your tree. This is where your citations, notes and comments come in useful. Each arcalife family tree supports 10,000+ profiles and is Gedcom enabled. If you have a FamilySearch family history account you can select the number of generations you would like to import, and our unique matching tools will flag any exceptions allowing you to clean up as you import your Family Tree into arcalife. Because of the flexibility of the arcalife tree, once you have built or imported you can re-arrange the positioning of each family tree node if you are unhappy with the layout. Relationships previously defined will be maintained unless you choose to modify them. Getting the best possible layout means that when you come to use our Family Tree colour printing service in super large sizes, up to 33x47 inches, your tree will look just the way you want it.

Arcalife also has a range of family history tips and guides that can give you advice on how to create a tree as well as specific information about using the tool itself.