How should you organize your family tree information? Traditionally, descendant family trees are published in a format like the Royal family tree following. This format is well understood and is therefore ideal except for the fact that it takes more space than is necessary. It is fine as long as all of the information can be displayed together. Most family trees become much too large to display everyone together in this format. This format has another problem in that it spreads out excessively in the horizontal direction.

A much more space efficient way of displaying a family tree is by using simple tables as shown in the example below. In this format, the families are displayed vertically rather than horizontally.  This has the advantage of using the minimum of space and also keeps all the generations in alignment. Using the minimum is space, means that you can put more information on one page an large family and multiple generation relationships can be better understood. Tables like this are well supported by word processing programs and are ideal for web publishing. If you need to describe a family in an e-mail message you can use lots of words or you can include a table.

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