Template

Family Tree Template

Last updated May 11, 20269 min read

A family tree is one of the most quietly powerful planning documents in fiction. For stories that span generations, multiple branches of a family, or political dynasties, the tree is the document you will reach for most often -- to settle who is whose cousin, to remember the dead, to track inheritance, to remind yourself which marriages produced which heirs. For stories with smaller scope, the tree is still useful: it surfaces emotional dynamics, names you might have reused without realising, and patterns of distance and closeness across generations.

This template gives you a structured way to build a family tree for your story. It assumes a fictional family, but the same framework works for historical fiction, memoir, or any project that requires you to think about real or imagined kinship in detail. The tree is most useful as a visual document. Plotiar's flowchart is a natural home for it, but you can also keep a structured text version if you prefer to write it out.

One framing note. Family trees in fiction are not the same as genealogies in real life. Real genealogies are exhaustive. Fictional family trees are selective. You only need the people who matter -- to the protagonist, to the plot, or to the world's understanding of itself. Resist the temptation to populate the tree for completeness's sake. Every node should earn its presence.

Section 1: The Anchor

Start by deciding who the tree is built around. Most family trees have an anchor character -- the person whose family this primarily is. It might be your protagonist. It might be the founder of a dynasty. It might be a long-dead figure whose legacy still shapes the present.

Anchor character: Whose family is this? In a multi-generational saga, the anchor may be the matriarch or patriarch of the earliest generation; in a contemporary novel, it may be the protagonist; in a fantasy series, it may be the founder of a royal line.
Scope: How many generations does the tree need to cover? Three generations is the standard scope for a contemporary novel. Five to seven for a saga. More than that, and the tree starts to lose its usefulness as a planning document.
Anchor time: What is the "present" of the tree? Is the tree as it stands at the start of the story, at the end, or as the omniscient writer of the family sees it across history?

What to write here: The anchor, the scope, the time frame. These three decisions shape everything that follows.

Section 2: Build the Skeleton

Sketch the bones of the tree first -- the structural relationships, with minimum identifying detail. This step is fast. The point is to have the shape before you start adding texture.

For each character, capture:

Name: Including any names they are known by in different contexts.
Birth and death dates (or eras): If your world has a calendar, use it. Otherwise, generational markers (born in the founding generation, died in the war) are sufficient.
Parents: One or two named parents. For complicated families (adoption, polyamorous traditions, non-biological parentage), capture the structure as it functions, not as it would appear on a hospital form.
Spouses or partners: Including remarriages, divorces, and other partnerships that produced children or affected inheritance.
Children: Named, in birth order if known.

What to write here: A flat list, three to five lines per character. Once this is built, you can draw the visual tree connecting them.

Section 3: Fill In the Texture

Now layer the texture that makes the tree useful for fiction. For each significant character, capture:

Role in the story

What this character's structural function is. Protagonist, antagonist, ghost (a dead character whose memory shapes the present), background reference, or off-page presence whose existence affects the plot.

Defining trait

One quality that captures who they are. "The reckless one." "The peacemaker." "The brother nobody talks about." The defining trait is shorthand for everything you might write at length elsewhere.

Cause of death (if applicable)

In family sagas, deaths are plot points. Cause of death often reveals the era's hazards and the family's specific vulnerabilities. A line of male heirs who all die young in wars tells you something about the dynasty's relationship to power.

Inheritance or legacy

What does this character pass down? Property, debt, a curse, a reputation, a secret, a piece of advice, a way of speaking, a physical resemblance? Family stories are largely the stories of what gets inherited and what gets refused.

What to write here: Four short fields for each character who carries meaningful weight in the story. Walk-on ancestors do not need texture; the people who matter do.

Section 4: The Hidden Tree

Almost every family in fiction has a hidden version of the tree. The version that the public believes, and the version that is actually true. This is where the most powerful family-story material usually lives.

Concealed parentage: Children whose biological parents are different from their acknowledged ones. The classic engine of family secrets.
Unacknowledged children: Children whose existence the family refuses to recognize. Half-siblings raised in different households. Children kept secret to protect inheritance lines.
Erased members: Names struck from family records. Branches that married badly, converted to the wrong religion, took the wrong political side, or simply embarrassed the family.
False family: People who pass as family but are not -- impostors, long-lost claimants, opportunistic in-laws who used the name without earning it.

The hidden tree is often the engine of family-saga plot. The reveal of a hidden branch can resolve a mystery, reframe a relationship, or detonate a generation's assumptions about itself.

What to write here: The hidden layer, drawn alongside the public version. Note who knows the secret, when they learned it, and what they have done with it since.

Section 5: Emotional Cartography

The tree, so far, captures structure. This step captures feeling. For each generational layer, identify the emotional patterns that connect the characters within it.

Alliances: Within a generation, who is bonded? Pairs of siblings who close ranks, cousins raised together, family members who share a private language no one else understands.
Fractures: The estrangements. The siblings who do not speak. The cousins divided by old wounds. The branches that have not been on the same continent in thirty years.
Repetitions: Patterns that echo across generations. The eldest son who becomes a priest in every generation. The aunt-niece line of writers. The men in this family who always die before they reach their father's age. Repetition is one of the most powerful tools in family fiction.
Reactions: Where one generation has shaped the next by their visible example -- and where the next has reacted against them. The children of strict parents who become permissive parents. The children of conventional families who break the mould. The generational dialogue is the family's deepest plot.

Section 6: Cross-Reference with Plot

Tie the tree back to the story's present.

Living characters in the story: Mark which family members are alive during the present of the story and which are referenced only. Living characters have arcs; dead ones have legacies.
Family events on the timeline: Births, deaths, marriages, exiles. These are the dates that anchor the family's history to the story's plot.
Inheritance pending: If a will, a title, a curse, or a property is in play, mark who is in line to receive it. Inheritance plots reward careful tree-building.
Names and naming patterns: Are children named after ancestors? Does the family avoid certain names because of who held them last? Naming patterns are character all the way down.

How to Customize This Template

For contemporary family novels: Three generations is usually enough. The grandparent layer, the parent layer, and the protagonist's layer. Spend more time on Section 5 (emotional cartography) than on the deeper history.
For multi-generational sagas: Five or more generations. Spend time on Section 3 (texture) and Section 4 (hidden tree). Sagas earn their length on the accumulation of generational pattern, and the tree is where that pattern lives.
For fantasy and historical dynasties: Add a section on titles, lands, and political positions. The dynasty's position in the world is part of the family's identity. Plotiar's flowchart can visualize both the family tree and the political-power chart side by side.
For memoir: The same template works. The discipline is to capture the family as it actually was, including the ambiguities and gaps. Some memoirs find their structure in the tree's unanswered questions.
For series: Update the tree at the end of each book. New marriages, new births, new deaths, new revelations. The tree becomes a living document, and the gap between Book 1's version and Book 3's version is itself a record of what the series has accomplished.

Build your family tree in Plotiar. Lay it out as a flowchart, attach a character profile to each node, and watch the generations come alive as you write. Try it free.