How to draw your own genogram: symbols, three generations and the right questions

Perhaps you have already read what a genogram actually is and why it tells you more than a family tree — and now you are sitting in front of a blank sheet of paper with no idea where to start. Which symbol stands for whom? Who should you even include? And what do you ask your mother without the conversation stalling at “everything was fine”?

This piece is a practical guide: step by step, I take you from a blank sheet to a three-generation genogram. I’ll show you the symbols therapists use (especially the relationship lines, which are the most interesting part), put together lists of questions for relatives by theme and — perhaps most importantly — point out what is worth preparing for emotionally before you start digging into family history.

One thing in advance: you don’t have to do a genogram “correctly”. Even a half-finished sheet full of question marks is valuable — the question marks are often the most eloquent part.

What you need before you draw the first line

The list is short and costs nothing:

• A large sheet of paper — A3 at minimum, better still two A3 sheets taped together or a piece of wrapping paper. Genograms always spread further than you expect, and crowding is the most common beginner’s problem.
• A pencil and an eraser — not a ballpoint pen. You will correct, erase, move things. A genogram is a working document, not a work of art.
• Two coloured pens — for the relationship lines (see below), so they stand apart from the kinship lines.
• A notebook or phone for notes — not all the stories you hear belong on the sheet; but they do belong in your memory.
• Time — you can make a first draft in an hour, but a genogram grows over weeks. Count on several sittings.

There are also programs and apps for drawing genograms, but for a first attempt I warmly recommend paper. The hand that draws remembers differently from the hand that clicks — and the eraser is part of the process, not a fault in it.

The basic symbols: the alphabet of the genogram

A genogram uses standardised symbols, systematised by Monica McGoldrick, Randy Gerson and Sueli Petry (2008) in a handbook that is now a classic of family therapy. The basics are simple:

• A square means a man, a circle a woman. Inside or beside the symbol you write the name and year of birth.
• An X across the symbol means the person has died; beside the symbol you add the year of death and, if you know it, the cause. Causes of death are often the first place where family silences show themselves.
• A double horizontal line between a square and a circle marks a marriage (the year of the wedding goes beside it); a single line marks an unmarried partnership.
• A broken bond: mark a divorce with two slashes across the marriage line (and the year of the divorce), and living apart without divorce with a single slash.
• Children hang on vertical lines below the couple line, arranged from the eldest on the left to the youngest on the right. Miscarriages, stillbirths and children who died early also have their symbols (a small triangle or a crossed-out circle) — and it is often these who carry the most that was never spoken, which I wrote about in the piece on family secrets.

Put yourself in the bottom row and mark yourself with a double outline — you are the starting point from which the sheet is read.

Relationship lines: where the genogram comes alive

Kinship lines tell you who is related to whom. Relationship lines tell you what it was like to live between them — and that is the part that makes a genogram more than a pedigree. They are drawn in colour, between any two people on the sheet:

• A close, supportive relationship: two parallel lines. People who are close to each other, who listen to each other, who trust each other.
• A conflictual relationship: a jagged, zigzag line. Constant friction, arguments, tension — but contact exists.
• A fused relationship: three parallel lines. Closeness without boundaries — two people who function as one, where neither can breathe without the other. Fusion looks like love, but it often doesn’t let a child become their own person; more on this in the piece on fusion and estrangement.
• A relationship that is fused and conflictual at once: three lines with a zigzag across them — a combination we therapists see surprisingly often: two people who can’t manage without each other, yet argue at every contact.
• A cut-off relationship: a line with two notches, broken in the middle. People who don’t speak — for a year or for thirty years. Always add the year of the cut-off and, if you know it, what triggered it.

As you draw these lines, watch for patterns: does the zigzag between fathers and sons repeat in every generation? Are cut-offs “inherited” in your family as a way of settling disputes? These questions are the whole reason we make genograms — I broke down what one can show you in more detail in the piece on the patterns a genogram reveals.

Three generations: what to record for whom

The standard is a three-generation genogram: you (with your siblings and partner), your parents with their siblings, and your grandparents. If you know more, add a fourth generation — but three are enough for the patterns to show. For each person, try to gather:

• Names and years: birth, death, marriages, divorces. The years matter more than they seem — only with them do you see the coincidences (“Grandmother lost her mother at eight; my mother fell ill at eight”).
• Occupations and education: they tell you how the family survived, and often reveal unwritten rules about work and money.
• Illnesses: physical and mental, addictions included. Here, be ready for euphemisms — “he liked a drink” or “she had bad nerves” are data; write them down word for word.
• Moves and losses: emigrations, wars, lost homes, early deaths, children who left home very early or very late.
• Turning points: what the family itself highlights when it tells its story — and what it skips.

Don’t try to gather everything at once. Make the first pass from memory, on your own. Only once you see the gaps do you know whom to ask and what.

A useful addition to a basic genogram is a timeline: along the bottom edge of the sheet, draw a line marked in decades and enter the key events on it — moves, deaths, marriages, job losses, wars. When events from different branches of the family stand on the same time axis, coincidences appear that you can’t see on the diagram itself: that three great losses happened within the same two years, or that your father closed in on himself in exactly the year he lost his brother.

The right questions for relatives — by theme

The question “what was your childhood like?” will as a rule get the answer “normal”. Concrete, small questions open up more. A few starting points by theme:

• Facts and circumstances: Where did you live when you were my age? How many of you slept in one room? What did the family live on? Who decided about money?
• Relationships: Who in the family were you closest to? Who was hardest to get along with? How did your parents argue — loudly, silently, not at all? Who didn’t speak to whom, and why?
• Emotions: What happened in your house when someone cried? Who was allowed to be angry? How did you celebrate — and how did you grieve?
• Turning points: Which event changed the family most? What happened during the war and post-war years? Who moved, who left, who never came back?
• Silences and taboos (carefully, and only once trust is established): Is there anyone in the family who was never spoken about? Was there a story you only found out about as an adult?
• Strengths: Who in the family are you proudest of? What kept the family standing in the hardest times? Which quality would you want passed on?

That last group is not decoration. Research on family narratives (Duke, Lazarus and Fivush, 2008) shows that what gives children and adults most psychological resilience is precisely knowing the whole family story — the highs and the lows together. A genogram that collects only wounds is just as distorted as a family album that shows only smiles.

How to ask the older generation: over an album, not over a form

If you still have living grandparents or elderly aunts and uncles, a genogram is a wonderful reason for the visit you would otherwise keep putting off. A few things I’ve learned in practice:

Don’t turn up with a form. Nothing closes a conversation faster than the feeling of being interrogated. Instead, bring an old photo album or a box of photographs and ask: “Who is this, then?” Photographs unlock memory and feeling around the defences — an older person will tell you, beside a picture, stories they would never tell in answer to a direct question.

Ask for stories, not for verdicts. Instead of “what was your father like?”, try “tell me about a moment with your father you most like to remember” — and then “and one that was hard for you”. A story always says more than an adjective.

Respect the pace and the boundaries. If the person falls silent at a topic, looks away or steers the conversation elsewhere, don’t force your way past it. Say: “I can see this is hard. It doesn’t have to be now.” Often people come back to the subject themselves — in an hour or in a month. The older generation lived through a great deal in times when hardship wasn’t talked about; your question may be their first invitation in decades.

Write it down the same day. The memory of what you heard fades incredibly fast. And if the person allows it, record the audio — in years to come it will be one of the most precious recordings you own.

Emotional preparation: a genogram can open things up

This is the part that instructions for drawing usually leave out, so I’m setting it down separately: a genogram is not only an intellectual exercise. When you see on paper for the first time that alcohol abuse runs through three generations, or when the years tell you that your mother was exactly as old when you were born as her mother was when she lost a child — that lands. In the body, not just in the head.

So a few safeguards: don’t draw your genogram late at night when you are exhausted. Work in shorter stretches and take a few minutes after each one to check how you are — the body often knows before the head does. Decide in advance whom you will tell about what you are discovering; alone with a difficult discovery, a person is needlessly alone. And allow some questions to remain unanswered — a genogram is allowed to have blank patches, and it is not your job to force the truth out of people who cannot give it.

Be prepared, too, for your questions to shift something in the family. Someone will be glad that at last somebody is asking. Someone will feel threatened. Both are normal, and both say something about the system you are exploring.

Where “do it yourself” reaches its limits — and when to take a genogram to a therapist

You can make a genogram entirely on your own, and that alone is valuable work. But it is only fair to say where the limits are. On your own you will gather the data and perhaps notice repetitions. It is harder, alone, to answer the questions that follow from them: why the pattern repeats, what part of it I am carrying and — above all — how to get out of it. On top of that, we are by definition blind to our own blind spots: people often overlook the most important pattern on their own genogram precisely because it is too familiar.

In therapy a genogram is not a document but a conversation. The therapist asks things you would never have thought to ask, notices where your voice changes at a particular name, and looks with you for connections between the sheet and your life today — how your grandmother’s story shows up in your attachment patterns or in what I described in the piece on intergenerational transmission.

That is exactly why I have included A Look into the Past among my services — an extended, 90-minute session in which the two of us draw your genogram together and translate it into questions for your life today. You can come with a blank sheet or with your own draft and a pile of question marks; both are an excellent starting point. You can find out more about the session on the Services page, and for an appointment or a question write to me via contact.

And if you do only one thing today: take a sheet of paper and draw three symbols — yourself and your two parents. Beside each, write one word that describes your relationship. That is the beginning. Everything else is a continuation.