Tools guide
A family tree maker built for real research.
Make Family Tree Now's family tree maker is a free, browser-based chart builder. You can add ancestors and descendants, attach source citations to every fact, mark living relatives as private, and export to GEDCOM 5.5.1 for use in any other genealogy tool. No account, no subscription, no ads inside the tree.
Most family tree makers on the market fall into two camps. Either they're subscription platforms that treat your tree as a hook for records-database billing, or they're free apps with a decade-old interface that punish you every time you try to attach a source. We built ours because neither camp was serving the researchers who write to this desk.
What the builder actually does
At its core the tool is a graph editor for people. You add a person, you connect them to parents, spouses, and children, and you attach the records that prove those connections. It renders as a classic pedigree (ancestor-facing) or as a descendant chart (family-facing) and exports as SVG, PDF, or GEDCOM.
- Unlimited people, generations, and events per tree.
- Source-first data entry: every fact has a citation field.
- Living-person privacy flag hides sensitive fields on export.
- GEDCOM 5.5.1 import and export for round-trip with any tool.
- Automatic Ahnentafel (Sosa-Stradonitz) numbering on the pedigree.
- Print-ready ancestor fan up to 12 generations.
- Local-first storage — your tree does not leave your browser until you export.
How researchers use it
A typical first session runs about 20 minutes. You start with yourself, add your parents, add each grandparent, and pause to attach whatever records you already have — a birth certificate PDF, a screenshot from the 1950 census, a photo of an old passenger manifest. From there most readers work backwards one generation at a time, using the linked archive guides on this site to pull the next set of documents.
The habit we recommend, and the one every long-term researcher eventually adopts, is to enter the source before the person. Open the record, transcribe it into a citation, then add the individuals it names. Trees built the other way — names first, sources 'later' — are the ones that collapse three years in when nobody can remember where a middle name came from.
Comparison: browser tools vs. desktop suites
| Feature | MFTN (browser) | RootsMagic (desktop) | Ancestry web tree |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | $40 one-time | Subscription tie-in |
| GEDCOM export | Yes | Yes | Yes, limited |
| Source-first entry | Yes | Yes | Partial |
| Works offline | Yes (local storage) | Yes | No |
| Records auto-attach | No (by design) | No | Yes (hint system) |
Auto-attaching record hints sounds like a benefit until you inherit a tree full of the wrong John Smith. The tradeoff we've chosen: no automatic hints, faster manual entry, and citations that stay accurate.
Common questions before you start
If your goal is a printed family tree for a reunion, use the pedigree export. If you're doing serious research and expect the tree to grow past 500 people, plan for GEDCOM backups from day one. And if you're inheriting a family binder from a relative — scan the pages before you type anything, because handwritten notes get read differently after you've entered the census data.
When you're ready to search for a specific ancestor, jump into the ancestor search playbook. When you need to understand which record types actually exist for a given decade or state, our genealogy records index is the reference desk.