In this and the following lecture, we're going to look at how to keep track of your progress with simple trees and charts. Hopefully so far through talking to your family and discussing photographs, you may have added to the information that you already have. And so your knowledge about your family's history is already beginning to grow. There's no time like the present to start thinking about how to organize your information and put it into a format that is easy to read. Yeah, we'll see a simple tree chart of my own family. Going back to my paternal grandparents, who lost all his wedding photograph of 1914 you might have seen this kind of chart before Which shows several generations coming down from a single person or couple at the top of the tree.
This kind of tree is useful for showing all the descendants in a particular line. And while it is useful for a few generations, you can probably see that once you've got several generations back, it will get extremely large. It's also only useful for one particular line of the family. So if you've researched several lines, then you're going to need several different trees. You will see that it is usual to mark the marriage relationship using an equal sign and that each set of children's and each couple are marked by a line coming down from that couple with a horizontal line above all the children of that couple. It is up to you how much information to put under each name.
But to keep it simple, it is often easy just to put in the birth and death dates as is given. In here all practical and useful chart for when you are growing your tree is the pedigree chart, which you should be able to see now. This is my own pedigree chart as it starts with me on the left and just read from left to right backwards through each generation, you can usually get about five or six generations on each page. This chart only shows the direct line going back in time and it's very useful for showing where you have gaps in your direct family line. In this case, because I have done a lot of research and I've been quite lucky, there are no gaps here. Once you have filled up this kind of chart, you can start again with another one further up the tree.
And you can see here that I have created one for my maternal grandmother Elizabeth Read. And you can see immediately here that there are a few gaps going further back where I can perhaps say, oh it might be a good idea now to have a look at the read some Benson's for example. Although the reason there are gaps is because the families are Irish and Irish research can be a little tricky. Now, you may have noticed that my charts are computer generated. And while you will probably start off by hand drawing your own charts, I do recommend that you invest in some family tree software which will generate these kinds of charts for you. The one I use and mostly recommend is family tree maker which is available from ancestry.
There are plenty available which you might also want to explore. Try the website my history.com which has a range of products for the genealogist. On this site you can also buy specially printed charts if you prefer to use pen and paper