When someone asks to see your family tree, what do you do? Your first impulse might be to go to your online tree and hit “Print.” Just a few decades ago, printing a paper copy was the only option available to genealogists who desired to share their research study with others.

I actually still have my first carefully hand printed five-generation pedigree chart, circa 1991. Nevertheless, I would not attempt trust this smudged, old and wrinkly, and insufficient variation of my tree as a backup, and I’m quite sure someone would laugh out loud if I gave them a copy now.

Rather, after nearly 30 years of research study, I’ve collected an extensive digital tree that consists of images, records, documents, web links, and more for hundreds of individuals within my extended household. That old piece of paper just could never tell the entire story.
There’s a time and location for almost whatever, and printing a tree can be the best move in a few circumstances– such as to present it to an older individual who does not utilize screens, for a craft or school task, or to show in your home.

In this short article I will walk you through how to print off your ancestral tree, for those moments when it is needed, and then proceed to simpler and better methods to share your valuable research that aren’t so taxing on the environment (and your time).

How To Print Your Family Tree
In this short article I will show you how to print your ancestral tree from Ancestry, MyHeritage, FamilySearch, and FindMyPast. Each service offers different output alternatives, from screenshots to bare-bones pedigrees to embellished charts total with family pictures.

If you’re looking for a big “Print” button on your program’s screen, you generally won’t find it quickly. That’s why I’ve decided to describe instructions for printing your tree from these four popular online services.

If you are trying to figure out how to print your tree from a downloadable program instead, it is typically a less complex job. Much of these programs have a print function that is integrated in and easy to use. Simply type the name of the program you utilize into your preferred online search engine with the words “how to print my tree” for help, or try to find tutorials on the program’s site.

MyHeritage: How to Print a Family Tree Chart
MyHeritage offers a great selection of beautiful forefather and descendant charts in all sizes and shapes, including one-page (for printers that manage poster-size paper) and multiple-page variations (for basic home printers). Household History Daily has a short article dedicated to this topic here if you would like more assistance and information.
Specific customization alternatives will differ depending on which design you choose, however here are the standard directions to get going:

1 Log in to your MyHeritage account and choose “More …” from the “Family tree” menu drop-down.
MyHeritage Print Family Tree 1.

2. When the “More” menu expands, select “Print charts & books.”
MyHeritage Print Family Tree 2

3 The “Charts & Books” page is simple to browse. You’ll select the type of chart you want to print. Choosing the radio button to the left of each choice shows a preview of the layout along with a description of the chart. Some choices use extra options, such as the “Descendents” or “Ancestors” options shown below with the brand-new MyHeritage sun chart.

MyHeritage Print Family Tree 3.

After you’ve selected the type of chart you ‘d like to print, follow the directions in action two (and in some cases, action three). When you’re prepared, struck the “Generate chart” button at the bottom to see a sneak peek of your completed item.
Depending on the information you include in your chart, it may take a few minutes for MyHeritage to produce a preview. In this case, you’ll see a notification that you’ll get an email when your chart is ready to view and print.

How to Print an Ancestry Family Tree
Ancestry provides two relatively straightforward alternatives for printing your family tree: a horizontal pedigree view and a vertical household view beginning with a single person and showing their forefathers. Unfortunately, there are no descendancy chart choices available for home printing on Ancestry.

There are advantages and disadvantages with each view. Pedigree view consists of just direct ancestors, but fits on one page of letter-sized paper. The family view consists of children/siblings, but it expands from side-to-side, so you might wind up needing to piece together several sheets of paper to see your entire tree. For the best printed outcomes, I recommend picking the pedigree view if you’re printing in the house.

Here’s how:

1 Log in to your Ancestry account, and select the tree you ‘d like to print from the “Trees” drop-down in the menu.

Printing an Ancestry Family Tree 1.

On the left side of your tree, click the “Pedigree View” symbol (the top alternative). This should display your tree broadening from left to right on the screen.

Pedigree View and Home Button Options on Ancestry

To make another individual the beginning person in your printed tree, just click that individual and after that select the tools icon on the right and click “View his (or her) family tree.”

View family tree for a specific person on Ancestry

3 To print what you see on the screen (as much as five generations), choose the “Print” button on the leading right side of your view.

Printing an Ancestry Family Tree 3.

4 Origins will display a preview, which you can print by clicking the orange “Print” button on the leading left of the sneak peek screen.

Printing an Ancestry Family Tree 4.

On the preview screen Ancestry offers you alternatives to develop a book, poster, or calendar. Clicking these buttons will take you to Ancestry’s MyCanvas site where you can personalize and purchase these products, however at an expense, so be aware that this is not a free offering.

FindMyPast: How to Print the Tree View on Your Screen
Printing alternatives for FindMyPast household trees are limited to your current screen view only. They have no other choices for printing at this time. To print what’s on your screen, click the printer icon in the top right area of any page.

FindMyPast Print Your Tree Option

If you have a Findmypast tree and want to print it with advanced tools you can likewise download a copy and import it into another site or program to accomplish this. See how to do so in this article.

How to Print Your FamilySearch Tree
At first glimpse, you may not think FamilySearch has terrific choices for printing concise, one- or two-page family trees. Its default tree screen view, called “Landscape” (what Ancestry refers to as “Pedigree”), requires a little scrolling to get beyond the first 3 generations. You’ll quickly find that FamilySearch uses rather a couple of enjoyable printing surprises.

Here’s how to find them:

1. After visiting to FamilySearch, choose “Tree” from the dropdown menu under “Family Tree.”

FamilySearch Print Family Tree Step 1

2. Clicking on the “Landscape” button on the top left of your page opens a brand-new menu offering 4 different kinds of tree views:

Landscape: a tree that begins with the home individual on the left and expands to the right with direct ancestors
Picture: a tree that begins with the home individual on the bottom and expands up with direct ancestors
Fan Chart: a fan-shaped three with the home person in the bottom center and direct forefathers spreading outward
Descendancy: a list beginning with the chosen person on top and their descendants noted below
FamilySearch Print Family Tree Step 2
The landscape and picture tree views are fairly straightforward, and appear immediately on your screen. Fan chart and descendancy provide numerous modification choices for your screen view. Please note, however, that much of these customized alternatives won’t appear on a printed tree so you will require to experiment.

3. Once you’ve chosen a tree view, click the “Options” button on the top right of your view and choose “Print” at the very bottom of the menu. (Note that the selections listed in the menu above “Print” apply to your screen view, and not the print view.).

FamilySearch Print Family Tree Step 3.

4. Clicking print takes you to a PDF version of your selection, from which you can select to download to your computer system or print using the buttons on the top right of your screen. Keep in mind, though, that some tree choices, like the Fan Chart view, don’t quickly print to simply one paper.

FamilySearch Print Family Tree Step 4.

Now, Let’s Move on to Why You Shouldn’t Print Your Family Tree and What You Can Do Instead.
Now that I have actually spent a long time showing you to print out your tree, I want to take a minute to explain why this is typically not the very best way to accomplish your goals.

As you can see, printing your family tree comes with various limitations depending upon which online system you utilize. With a lot of, the amount of info you can include is limited– sometimes to simply a name, year of birth, and year of death. Printing one legible page can be challenging, too.

Plus, naturally, printed trees are easy to lose, simple to ruin or damage, and difficult to share. They also are not, normally, the most environmentally sound choice. I recommend you prevent printing unless you are showing someone who has no other alternative however to see the information offline, or are utilizing the print-out for some sort of job.

Today’s technology uses much better alternatives for sharing all of the information you’ve collected in your family tree. Some of these even enable you to share images, sources, records, and more.

Option: Give someone access to your online tree.
The kindness of others and determination to work together is one of the most gorgeous elements of genealogy. A lot of online programs, like MyHeritage and FamilySearch, are constructed to allow easy sharing.

Public MyHeritage family sites and the shared, public FamilySearch Family Trees, are open for customers to check out. Living family members are concealed for privacy factors, however both MyHeritage and FamilySearch use choices for you to share even this information with picked individuals.

Origins and FindMyPast likewise offer ways to share your tree as well as the records, images, and documents you’ve collected. If you choose to keep your tree public, you have the option of hiding info about living individuals, and anyone can discover it.

While a FindMyPast tree can only be shown another registered user, Ancestry allows you to share your tree with anybody by welcoming them utilizing their email address, or by sending them a tailored shareable link. You can control whether the person can include or edit details by designating them as a visitor, editor, or factor.

Every one of these websites has assistance docs for how to achieve sharing, so take a look and see what works best for you.

Second Option: Keep it in the cloud.
As soon as you print your tree utilizing the choices above, you have a static picture of info to share or save. Even though the data on your hard copy will be restricted, if you pick to save it, think about saving it to your computer system or the cloud rather of as a paper copy.

You can conserve your “hard copies” to a PDF file– a file format that saves your page as an uneditable image– and after that conserve those PDFs to a cloud-based storage system like Google Drive, Dropbox, iCloud, or Microsoft OneDrive. Most computers now have a “Print to PDF” alternative when printing something from your screen, so this ought to be simple to do. If not, lots of extensions exist that you can contribute to your browser for this purpose.

Cloud-based storage alternatives permit you to access your files from any computer with an internet connection and they all make sharing files with others quite basic, so this can be a good way to show others your research study. You can save and publish a copy of your complete GEDCOM for sharing to a cloud service as well (see listed below).

And, if you utilize Google for your e-mail, you currently have a great place to conserve files like this totally free. It’s called Google Docs. Family History Daily provides an article about how this no-cost service can assist you in your research study here.

This short article offers information about where to discover and how to utilize numerous totally free or affordable cloud storage choices.

3rd Option: Download and share a GEDCOM file.
GEDCOM, brief for Genealogical Data Communication and pronounced “JED-com,” is a specialized file format utilized to share or save genealogical details. The majority of genealogical programs (both online and software-based) accept uploads from GEDCOM files and enable users to download trees in GEDCOM format.

Here’s a terrific tutorial on how to download your ancestral tree to a GEDCOM file in MyHeritage, Ancestry, and FindMyPast.

As soon as you’ve downloaded your tree, you can share it with another individual by connecting the file to an email or waiting to a USB drive (flash drive) or to the cloud, as described above. As long as the individual getting it has access to a software application or online service that accepts GEDCOM files, they’ll have the ability to open your tree completely.

Note, however, that the individual uploading your tree from a GEDCOM file will only have the ability to see text-based information like names, dates, and events. GEDCOM files don’t include images, files, or connected records, although they will reveal source citations, so if you’re supporting your tree by saving a GEDCOM file you’ll need to take extra actions to access your records, images, and files also.

Here’s what you need to do to ensure you’ll always have access to your family tree records when you can’t discover them in a GEDCOM file.

Of the three options noted above, sharing directly from your online tree is typically the easiest technique and offers completion user with the most information, however all of these alternatives are great options to a printed paper tree.

Finally, before we get off the topic of printing trees, make sure you take a minute to back up your tree for your own records too. Find out how to do that here.

Happy sharing!