Have you ever thought about who should or shouldn’t be added to your family tree? In this post, I’ll discuss what you should consider before adding someone to your tree.
Most people start building their family trees because they want to learn about their ancestors. This makes adding ancestors to our tree the most easy and exciting choice, since most of us do get a little thrill when we are able to go one more generation back on our tree.
Our other relatives are those who might get neglected in our family trees. Do we add our second and third cousins? Our great-great grand-uncles?
When we add our dad’s first cousin and his children, do we put their spouses? What about the parents of their spouses?
Is there a point at which someone doesn‘t belong in our family tree? Keep reading to find out who you should definitely add, and who you might be able to leave out.
Immediate family
Immediately family members should always be added to your family tree. You are the best person to identify who your immediate family members are, and so it is an excellent idea to record your siblings, parents, and grandparents in your family tree.
Many people overlook adding their own immediate relatives to their family tree because they don’t think that it is important to do so. Of course, we know who our parents and siblings are, but those who view our tree generations in the future may not.
Your in-laws
Some people add the parents of their spouse to their family tree and may even build their spouse’s family tree without starting a new tree. There are advantages and disadvantages of having all of your research on one tree.
On most of the online family tree websites, you can’t export just one branch of the tree into a GEDCOM file to transfer your tree to another software. If your tree and your spouse’s tree are combined, this could prove to be a major headache.
My strategy is to add only my husband’s parents and grandparents to my tree. This way, someone researching in the future identify that they have found the correct family, yet I don’t have to deal with the downsides of having all of my husband’s relatives in my tree.
This doesn’t mean that I don’t work on my husband’s genealogy. I have an entirely separate tree where I work on my husband’s complete family tree where I try to add the same groups of relatives that I mention in this article.
Ancestors
As mentioned earlier in this article, it’s easy to make a decision about adding ancestors to our tree. As long as we have used genealogy records to determine that a potential ancestor is really our ancestor, we should probably add them to our tree.
Some people set limits on how far back they want to add people in their family tree. Sometimes these limits align with previously set research goals, and other times the limits have more to do with how accurate genealogy can really be going back many hundreds of years.
When I first started building my family tree, I decided I wanted to figure out the name of the town where all of my immigrant ancestors came from in their home country. For some of lines of my tree, this meant only going back three or four generations to a Slovak village.
Some of my ancestors came to the United States with groups of the first European settlers, which means that tracing these lines of my tree has taken me on a trip through many, many generations of ancestors. In these cases, I almost always stop at the immigrant ancestor because most of the information available going further back is very unreliable.
Our research goals can shift over time, however. You might discover a fascinating ancestor on one line of your tree that takes you on an unexpected journey.
Where you stop adding ancestors is a matter of personal preference.
Extended family
Adding your extended family to your family tree can make it easier to learn about your recent ancestors. Examples of extended relatives include aunts, uncles, great-grandparents, great-uncles and aunts, as well as first and second cousins.
Some people might even consider their third cousins to be extended family, as they are technically not distant cousins.
As a general rule, I add as many of my first, second, and third cousins as I can to my tree. In this task, I am limited by my knowledge of my cousins and who shows up on my DNA match list, since most of my cousins are still alive and not easily researched on genealogy sites like Ancestry.
I have found a great number of second and third cousins on my DNA results from the various companies that I have done tests with or uploaded to. This has been a very good way of filling in a lot of blanks in my tree, and it also helps me identify the parents and grandparents of those cousins so I can add them to my tree, too.
The most important thing to consider when it comes to adding someone who is currently living to your family tree is privacy. I build my tree on Ancestry, and so I can designate someone as “living” and information from their profile in my tree will not show up in Ancestry search or to anyone who views my tree; these measures protect their privacy.
Most online tree-building sites have a similar feature, but you do need to make sure that you make sure to mark that they are living when you add them to your tree. Otherwise, people might be able to see personal information that you have added and this could cause privacy issues for your relative.
Collateral relatives
Collateral relatives are people who are descended from the siblings of your ancestors. Some of your collateral relatives are also members of your extended family (mentioned in a previous section), but others are more distantly related to you.
An example of collateral relatives that you could add to your tree would be the children of the siblings of your great-great-great grandfather. The way I usually end up adding these relatives to my tree is through my research of the siblings of the great-great-great grandfather.
I’ll find the siblings, figure out whether they were married and who their spouses were, and then research to see if they had any children. If I have any particular interest in this line of the family, I may find out who the children married, and add their spouses and children.
This strategy is sometimes called building a “wide family tree“. The downside is that the family tree can grow very quickly, as we do have a large number of collateral relatives descended from our more distant ancestors.
Spouses of your relatives
Generally, it is recommended to include the spouse of your relative in your family tree, as long as you know the information. If you are adding distant relatives to your tree and you aren’t planning on adding their children, then you could theoretically skip adding their spouse.
There are some instances when I think it is really helpful to add a spouse, even when the relative is not closely related. For example, many women take their husband’s surname when they get married.
Children born of their marriage will generally have their father’s surname, which is why I usually try to find out the name of the spouse of my female cousins. Knowing what the father’s surname is can be helpful, especially when it comes to researching how we are related to our DNA matches because some of our DNA matches may have this surname, or may be descended from this couple.
In-laws of your relatives
Many people add spouses of their relatives and their parents and even grandparents. There may be some instances when this is helpful, but I usually avoid adding the in-laws of my relatives.
I think I have added a few in-laws of relatives to my tree when I am especially interested in a specific person, but I have not added grandparents or great-grandparents of any of my relatives. Some people do add these relatives to their tree, as I have seen my husband’s mother and grandmother in the family trees of some of my relatives.
Ex-spouses of living relatives
Should you add the ex-husbands and ex-wives of your living relatives? There is more to think about when it comes to whether you should add and research the ex-spouses of people who are still alive, since you don’t want to violate their privacy or make anyone feel uncomfortable.
I have a relative who had a brief marriage when they were younger, with no children born to their union. This relative has since remarried and now has adult children born of this second marriage.
Since my relative asked me to keep their first marriage private, I won’t add it to my tree. Maybe someday in the future a genealogist will track down their first spouse and put them in the tree, but out of respect to my relative, that genealogist will not be me.
Many of us likely have relatives with similar situations. Do you add the prior spouses to your family tree? Do you ask for your relative’s input?
If you are closely related to someone and have a close relationship, you probably know whether they would mind having their ex-spouse in your family tree. If there are children from the relationship, it makes a lot of sense to include that parent in your tree.
However, if there are no children from the relationship, adding the ex-spouse may only serve to make people feel uncomfortable or bring up bad memories from the past.
Conclusion
I hope you have found this discussion of who should be added to your family tree to be interesting. I’d love to know which relatives you add to your tree, and how you make the decision of who to add.
If you have any questions about something that you read in this post, please feel free to leave a comment in the discussion below.
Thanks for stopping by!