A family tree chart is probably what most people think of first with regard to genealogy. As we’ll be showing in the pages to follow, there’s much more to family history than that, but putting together a family tree is a good starting point and provides a useful focus for all of your research.

There are several different styles of tree if you want to go down the traditional pen and paper route – see below. Most genealogy software packages will also allow you to enter details of family members one by one, and then automatically produce a chart to print out showing their relationships.

But now you can take advantage of easy-to-use online tools, too. At TreeView.com you can build your tree for free, with your data stored securely to return to at any time, and you can click straight through to historic records about individual ancestors.

Also, putting your tree online means that you can make contact with other people who are researching the same ancestors as you.

There’s no need to worry about security, either: you can choose whether other researchers can contact you, and indeed whether you want living members of your family to be hidden from public view.