Genealogy Chart/Family Tree

Question

There are a large variety of options to creating a family tree. One great feature that Family Tree Maker had was showing many various methods of doing this, however, unfortunately, Family Tree Maker is all but being discontinued.

Really the answer would depend on what you want out of it and what purpose it served. If you are using it to pass down or to display to people, then something on paper can be a nice way to do it. You can find online (eBay even), a number of blank pedigree charts that you fill in that go up to (probably) more generations than you could ever need.

If you were looking to have an index-style resource, you could get a big book of blank paper (journal or log-style) and maintain generational lines. For example start with one member of your family, then two lines down write their father and to the right of the father write the mother. Two lines below the father write his father, etc. For the mother, underneath draw a circle; within that circle, you would write a page number that corresponds to where that woman's father is located. On that page you would write him down on the top, followed by his father two lines down and continue as on the first page. Above him, however, you would have a circle with a number referring to the page that his child is on (in this case page 1, or, if you prefer, 1001). This style has obvious limitations, but it is a way of indexing direct lines of descent that is easy to refer to.

I know that these hand-written chart may be old-school and not exactly what you are looking for, but they are a great reference and sometimes it may be good to have hard copy records of all of your hard work.

Electronic databases or programs are something that I am not up to being able to offer advice on at the moment. If you check out Ancestry.com, or even WikiTree.com, you may find some great examples of how to do this though and just F12 it on your browser to see the Front-End of how the page is put together. I hope that helped.