Genogram Maker

Build a genogram by adding people, not by dragging boxes

Most free genogram makers hand you a blank canvas and a palette of shapes, then leave you nudging squares around until the lines stop crossing. This one works from lists instead. You add a person, give them a name, a symbol and a few years, and they appear in the diagram straight away. You add a couple, pick the two people from dropdowns, and a partner line is drawn between them. You add children to that couple, and the parent lines and the generation rows sort themselves out.

That means the diagram is always tidy, because you never place anything by hand. Generations are worked out from the relationships you have entered: anyone with no parents in the chart sits on the top row, every child drops exactly one row below their lowest parent, and partners are pulled onto the same row as each other so a couple line is always horizontal. Sibling groups are centred underneath the couple they belong to. Add a grandparent halfway through and the whole chart re-flows in place rather than breaking.

Everything runs in the browser. There is no account to create, no diagram limit, no watermark stamped across the export, and nothing is uploaded anywhere. Your work is kept in the browser's own storage so a stray refresh does not cost you the afternoon, and Start over clears it completely.

What the symbols mean

Genogram notation was standardised by Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson in the 1980s and is still the reference used in family therapy, social work and nursing training today. A square is a male family member, a circle is a female family member, and a diamond is used when gender is unknown, not recorded, or outside that binary. Everyone in the chart gets one symbol, and the symbol is drawn the same size regardless of generation.

An X drawn through the symbol means the person has died. The shape underneath stays visible so you can still read their gender at a glance, and the birth and death years printed below the symbol give you the rest of the story. Typing a death year in the tool ticks the deceased box for you; if you know someone has died but not when, tick the box and leave the year blank.

A fully shaded symbol marks somebody affected by whatever the chart is tracking, which might be a genetic condition, a diagnosis, an addiction, or a pattern of behaviour you are mapping for an assignment. A half-shaded symbol marks a carrier, meaning a person who carries one copy of a recessive allele without showing the trait themselves. Clinical genetics teams following NSGC pedigree nomenclature often use a small central dot for a carrier instead of half shading, so check what your course expects before you hand work in. The small arrow at the lower left of a symbol points at the index person, called the proband in genetics, which is the person the chart was drawn about.

The line between a couple carries meaning too. A solid horizontal line is a marriage, a dashed line is an unmarried partnership or cohabitation, one diagonal slash across the line means separated, and two slashes mean divorced. A vertical line dropping from the middle of a couple line to a horizontal bar, with a short stub up to each child, is the parent-to-child relationship. Children appear left to right in the order you add them, which is conventionally oldest first.

Emotional relationship lines

The feature that separates a genogram from an ordinary family tree is that it records how people relate, not just who descended from whom. The Emotional relationships panel draws a line straight between any two people in the chart, whichever generation they are in. Close is a heavy green line, distant is a light dashed line, conflict is a red zigzag, and cut off is a line broken by two bars, the convention for a relationship that has been severed.

These are the lines that turn a family tree into an assessment tool. A social work student mapping a case can show at a glance that a grandmother is close to a grandchild while the child's parents are in open conflict, and that one adult sibling has cut contact with the family entirely. Because emotional lines run directly between the two symbols, a busy chart will have lines crossing the diagram, which is exactly how hand-drawn genograms look in the textbooks.

If you are producing a genetics pedigree chart rather than a genogram, skip this panel completely. Pedigrees record biological relationships and phenotype only, so leave the emotional lines empty and use the affected and carrier shading instead.

Genogram, pedigree chart or family tree?

All three draw the same underlying skeleton of parents, partners and children, but they are built for different questions. A family tree is a genealogical record: it answers who is descended from whom, usually spreading as wide and as far back as the records allow, and it cares about names, dates and places.

A pedigree chart is the biologist's version. It uses the same squares and circles but concentrates on a single inherited trait, shading affected individuals so that the pattern of inheritance becomes readable. Generations are numbered with Roman numerals and individuals within a generation with Arabic numerals, and from the shaded pattern you work out whether a condition is autosomal dominant, autosomal recessive, X-linked or mitochondrial. The pedigree creator here gives you the shading, the carrier half-fill and the proband arrow you need for that work.

A genogram is the clinician's version. It usually covers three generations, and alongside the structure it records medical history, ages, occupations, significant events and, crucially, the quality of the relationships between people. Family therapists, social workers, counsellors and nurses use them to see patterns repeating across generations that nobody in the family had noticed. The same tool builds either one; the difference is which fields you fill in.

Using it for a class assignment

For a three-generation genogram assignment, work from the top down. Add the oldest generation first, usually two sets of grandparents, then create a couple for each pair and set the relationship type. Add the middle generation next and attach them as children of the right couple. Then add the partners they married in, create those couples, and finally add the youngest generation as children. Because the layout is automatic, you can enter people in any order, but going top down keeps the sibling order sensible.

Fill in the years as you go. Birth and death years print under the name, and the note field takes one short line for whatever your brief asks for: a condition, an occupation, a cause of death, an age, or a note that someone was adopted. Keep notes short, because long ones are trimmed to fit under the symbol.

Load example family gives you a finished ten-person, three-generation chart with a deceased grandfather, a divorced couple, an affected child, a carrier, a proband arrow and all four emotional line types. It is the fastest way to see the notation working and to check your own chart against a correct example before you start. Clearing it and building your own takes a couple of minutes.

When the chart is finished, Download PNG gives you a high-resolution image at twice screen size, ready to drop into a Word document, a slide deck or a submission portal. Print opens a clean white printable page with the diagram and, if you have left the legend switched on, the key underneath it. Leaving the legend on is worth doing for any work that will be marked, because it shows the marker you know what each symbol means.

Who uses genograms

Family therapists and counsellors draw them with clients in the room, because the act of building the chart together surfaces stories and patterns that a questionnaire never reaches. Social workers use them in assessments to map households, carers and support networks, and to show at a glance where the strain in a family sits. Nursing and medical students use them to take a structured family health history and spot inherited risk.

Biology and genetics students use the same notation as a pedigree chart to practise reading inheritance patterns, working out from the shading whether a condition is dominant or recessive and whether it sits on an autosome or the X chromosome. Psychology students build them for family systems coursework, and genealogists occasionally borrow the notation when a plain family tree cannot show a second marriage or a half-sibling clearly.