Many writers need to develop a family tree for their characters. A rough sketch on paper or flowchart software will sometimes do the trick, but where the ages and dates are important, or there is a complexity in the character relationships, writers sometimes need to resort to something a little more process-orientated.
With MyHeritage’s Family Tree Builder, the writer can download a free piece of software with enough functionality to allow for all those family trees, or even some proper genealogy if we wish.
Introduction to my Family Tree Making Criteria
I first discovered Family Tree Builder a year or so ago. As a family, we are currently trying to adopt another child, and within the very thorough (read – several years) process of being assessed as a potential adopter, both my husband and I had to produce family trees to go into a report. And we are talking “big” trees even at our first generations, because we come from large families.
I looked around initially at the Genealogical software available, and baulked at the cost of some of these. I wanted a program which could put together a tree with enough details such as names, birthdates, links, images, and different relationships, hopefully in some quick charts. But I wanted it quickly – without the necessity of importing in gedcom files, or doing some thorough family research through archived files online or off.
This same set of criteria as I worked with for my own adoption reports, sit readily for many writers. Perhaps with the additional aspects of dealing with alternative worlds or historical dates – or future dates for that matter.
Whereas there is some very good software out there, built for the purposes of using legitimate data from archives, much of it is expensive, and for the writer, difficult to use for a variety of reasons. That software sometimes holds checking data programs which spit out error messages if you try to input a future date, or input an outer-worldly setting which its linked database doesn’t recognise as an actual place on Earth.
MyHeritage.com’s Family Tree Builder allows for different dates and places of birth, but is strong enough to allow you to input and create multiple levels of sometimes complex graphs of characters and their relationships. And it’s Free.
As I have recently moved over onto a new computer, and am busy developing some characters for my newer novel, I decided it was time to download FTB again, and take it for a whirl. The following are simple screenshots and annotations showing you me putting the program through it’s paces, and some of the functions found within.
Using Family Tree Builder
1. Install and Setting Up a New Project
Family Tree Builder comes with numerous language support, a linked community and can be used for legitimate genealogy research and documentation. Download it for windows, and the install will guide you through to creating a new Genealogy Project (or I could import my own family tree put together last year if I wanted to continue adding to this).
Note: the free version of FTB still comes with publishing ability to a website. For my fictional piece of work, I’m obviously not going to do this, but it might be a nice idea, should you be working on a collaborative project with another author.
2. Adding My First Family
After creating a project, the program guides you through adding your first family. Within literally minutes I had my initial family, complete with a mother, father and three children, with birthdates, and decease dates, and reasons.
3. Adding Photos
All the people (characters) in FTB can have multiple photos associated with them. Using the Photos functions I imported in two photos for one of my main characters, setting one of these to her profile photo also (which will appear in the tree panels, and graphs).
I also imported in more images for the other family members, some of which were associated to multiple people as these were group photos.
4. Adding More Relationships
My story involves an event which leads to one of these characters being fostered out to new parents – and therefore a change of name and identity. This character inherits a complicated relationship genograph, and I have used FTB to create these new people.
Unfortunately, FTB doesn’t allow you to print the family tree out showing multiple parentage, even with the new All-in-One chart for Premium account holders. Instead, you are confined to seeing each family individually in several formats such as reports and graphs.
To get around this, I went back, and created the same character as a separate identity for the original family, then married them off together at the date of the adoption. By making this temp person the main basis for a report, I now had a structural graph showing both sides of the family. This is not, admittedly, an ideal solution to showing something like adoption, but a good workaround for a free piece of software.
Note: the above chart, called the All-In-One chart, isn’t available in the free program. You must subscribe for this, which is a cost of £54 annually. However, if you have a less complicated need, where you are after a large family tree ancestor grouping up to your main characters, with any kind of dates input, then Family Tree Builder may well be a good solution.
5. Working with the Main Character
Despite the work-arounds above, to get the adoptive family chart onto the same chart, now I could work with the main character going forward. I simply added a new relationship to this main character, a boyfriend in this case. To get him onto the chart, there had to be a link between him and my main character, so I married her off again (marriage allows for all sorts of partnerships including divorces, separations, partners, and links between same-genders as you can see above).
Despite already being married off to her twin in the chart above, FTB allowed me to add her boyfriend also (with a warning I took no notice of) and my final chart now shows all the main players in my story. I can add to this accordingly with additions of bosses and others (perhaps in a new family tree for the main character) if I wish. With the free form of Family Tree Builder, my up-to-date relationship chart would look like the final one below.
Summary
There are some limitations in using Family Tree Builder for fictional family tree creation, particularly if you need to develop a complicated tree involving name changes and changes to parentage or partnerships. Only direct ascendents or descendents can be charted with this software, although unrelated people can be added to the program where you need it. With the free program, reports and charts are restricted to an either / or basis – either ancestry or descendents or immediate family.
With a bit of creativity you can develop workarounds to allow a full chart to be shown of your characters in most cases. However, I had to upgrade, and at some cost, to get to the graph I was actually interested in for my own fictional work. Family Tree Builder, as a free product, provides an excellent basis for the creation of large ancestral family trees, and as such I would recommend you take a look at it if you need such a tool in your writing set.
For a different product, consider GenoPro, which can create some complicated genograms (which will include the adoptive side of your characters). GenoPro is not free, however, and will cost US$49 for a single license.
LinkMe: Download myheritage.com Family Tree Builder
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June 25th, 2009 at 3:49 pm
Hi Michelle,
Just thought I’d drop you a note regarding name changes through adoption, etc. You CAN actually add another set of parents to a person with Family Tree Builder. The program then offers you a choice of detaching that individual from the parents already listed, adding new parents as those adopting this person or adding them as the biological parents with the already listed parents being noted as those adopting. You can also click on ‘Names’ in the editing area of an individuals listing and add a second set of names (and possibly more if need be – I’m not sure of this as I’ve not needed the function.) On the chart, the current name will be shown with Former Last Name (in the case of an adopted child perhaps) shown directly below.
I hope that wasn’t too convoluted a ‘tip’
and that it helps with your character creations!