Fictional Family Tree Maker
No AI, no sign-up: build a family tree for your OCs, a fantasy dynasty or a found family by hand. Add people, partners and children, and the tree lays itself out generation by generation, second marriages and cousins who marry included. It stays in your browser.
- No sign-up
- Runs in your browser
- No AI, no waiting
10 people, 3 generations
Select a person to edit them, or to add a partner or a child; the tree lays itself out. Drag the background to move around (on a phone, one finger anywhere on the tree, while it is bigger than the screen), and zoom with the buttons, a pinch, or Ctrl and the scroll wheel. With the keyboard, Tab to a person and use the left and right arrows to move them, or Delete to remove them; on the tree itself, the arrows move the view, + and − zoom and 0 fits it. Undo with Ctrl+Z. The tree stays in this browser as you work.
How the lines are drawn
- Married
- Partners
- Betrothed
- Separated
- Born to them
- Adopted
- Stepchild
- Fostered
How to use it
- Start from the royal house already on the screen, pick another start (a farming family or a found family), roll a house of names from a genre, or start a new tree and add the first person yourself.
- Select someone to edit them: their name, house, years and a short note. From there, add a partner, add a child to one of their couples (born to them, adopted, a stepchild or fostered), or join them to someone already in the tree.
- The layout is worked out for you: partners side by side, children under their parents, each generation in its own row. Move a person or a whole family left or right with the buttons or the arrow keys when you want a different order.
- Zoom, pan and fit the tree with the buttons in its corner. Every change can be undone. The tree is kept in this browser as you work, and you can save it as a PNG or SVG image, as a file to open again, or as a file for the Character Relationship Map.
Families it draws
As many generations as you need, up to 150 people in one tree. A king with two queens, a bride whose parents come to the wedding, a pair of royal cousins who wed to keep the land together: each is laid out without a line through anyone. A child's tie to their parents (by birth, adopted, a stepchild or fostered) has a line of its own.
Planning a dynasty before you draw it
A family tree is most useful when it answers a question your story asks. Who sits on the throne when the book opens? Who would sit there if three people died? Which marriage joined two houses, and which one failed? Decide the one or two questions first, and the tree tells you how many generations you need. Most stories need three: the people whose choices made the world, the people living with those choices, and the children who will inherit them.
Then work from the middle. Put your main characters in first, add their parents, and only then decide how far back the line goes. A tree built from the founder down tends to fill up with names nobody in the story ever mentions. A tree built outwards from the people on the page stays small, and every name on it has a reason to be there.
Succession: who inherits, and who thinks they should
In a ruling family the order of birth is a plot device. Settle the rule early: the eldest child, the eldest son, the child the ruler names, or whoever the council accepts. Write it in the note on the founder's card. Once the rule is fixed, the tree shows you at a glance who is next in line, who is one death away from power, and who has every reason to resent the arrangement.
The interesting people are rarely the heirs. They are the younger sister with the better claim under an older law, the cousin descended from a disinherited branch, the child of a second marriage whose mother wants more for them. Look for the branches that come close to the crown without touching it, because that is where ambition lives. Years under each name help here: a gap of twenty years between siblings makes a very different court from a gap of two.
Marrying in, second marriages and cousins who marry
Real dynasties are untidy, and fictional ones should be too. People marry into the family and bring their own parents with them. A widowed king marries again, so one person has two partners and children from both. Royal cousins marry to keep land in the family, which means the same ancestors appear twice. In a general diagram tool you place every card by hand, and the lines soon cross.
This tool lays them out on purpose. Someone with two partners sits between them, with each couple's children under that couple. An in-law's parents come in beside the family their child joined. When cousins marry, the couple share a generation and their lines meet without a loop. The one thing it refuses is a family nobody could draw: a person who would be their own ancestor, or partners a generation or more apart. When you try one of those, it says so in plain words.
Keeping a big family readable
A tree with sixty names is a reference, not a picture. Use the house field for the family each person belongs to, so a reader can tell the Ashcombes from the Thornleighs, and give each house a colour of its own. Keep names short on the cards and put titles in the name only when they matter: a tree full of Lord and Lady is harder to scan than one where the titles mark the people who hold them.
Order helps more than you might expect. Put brothers and sisters in birth order, eldest on the left, and keep the main line near the middle by moving the families that married in towards the edges. If one branch grows large enough to need its own page, save it as a separate tree and keep a single card for it on the main one, with a note saying where the rest lives.
Families that aren't only by birth
Not every child is born to the people who raise them. Each child here has a tie to their parents: by birth, adopted, a stepchild or fostered, and each kind is drawn with its own line, so the difference is visible without being the first thing anyone sees. A child can have birth parents and adoptive parents in the same tree, which matters for any story about where someone comes from.
Found families work the same way. The innkeeper who takes in strays, the ship's crew who raise a cabin girl, the band of outlaws who become each other's only kin: draw them as partners and foster children, and the tree shows the household as it really is. If the bond is closer to friendship than family, the Character Relationship Map may suit it better than a tree.
From the tree to the story
A tree records who is related to whom; a story needs to know how they feel about it. Once the family is in place, save it for the relationship map. Everyone keeps their place, couples become love (or exes, once separated) and parents are joined to their children as family. There you can add the rivalries, the grudges and the secret alliances that a family tree has no line for.
Keep the tree as a working file rather than a finished picture. Open it again when you plan a sequel, add the children born between books, and change a marriage to separated when the story needs it. Every change can be undone, and the file is yours: nothing is uploaded, and nothing about your family is sent to us.
Example family trees
Royal house
A king and queen, their three children, two marriages into other houses, and three grandchildren.
- First generation
- King Edric and Queen Rosamund
- Second generation
- Prince Alaric, Lady Elinor, Princess Cressida, Lord Bastian and Prince Tobias
- Third generation
- Edmund, Wynne and Rhys
Farming family
Three generations on one farm, with the eldest son's wife and the orphan they took in.
- First generation
- Thomas Hollins and Bess Hollins
- Second generation
- Ned Hollins, Joan Pryor, Peg Hollins and Will Hollins
- Third generation
- Kit Hollins, Molly Hollins and Sam Hollins
Found family
An innkeeper and her partner who foster and adopt the children who turn up at their door.
- First generation
- Martha Greave and Oswin Pike
- Second generation
- Juniper, Ash Mallory, Rook and Tally Greave
- Third generation
- Fen Mallory and Wren
A rolled house: House Wolfhardt
What Roll a house makes with royal names: three generations, one house name, years for everyone. Every roll is different.
- First generation
- Adyldin and Gweneantand
- Second generation
- Berioric, Wilealmia, Conerd, Sera and Coraurdreign
- Third generation
- Sereila, Reymars and Reylle
Questions
- Is the family tree maker free, and does it use AI?
- It is free, with no account, and there is no AI in it. You build the family yourself, and the layout is worked out by rules on your device. Roll a house names a family with the Character Name Generator's word lists, which are written by hand.
- Can a character have more than one marriage?
- Yes. Add a second partner to anyone, and each couple keeps its own children. A couple can be married, partners, betrothed or separated, and you can change that later without losing the children.
- What happens if two cousins marry?
- Select one cousin and join them to the other as partners. The tree puts them in the same generation and draws the lines to both sets of parents without a loop. It only refuses a family that would make someone their own ancestor.
- Why can't I drag people around?
- Because the layout keeps everyone tidy: partners together, children under their parents, generations in rows. You can still change the order within a generation with Move left and Move right, or the arrow keys on a selected card, and the rest of the tree follows.
- Where is my tree saved?
- In this browser, as you work, so it is still here when you come back on this device. Nothing is uploaded. To keep a copy or carry on elsewhere, save it as a file and open it again here. Start a new tree clears the copy in this browser.
- Can I open the tree in the relationship map?
- Yes. Save for the relationship map downloads a file that the Character Relationship Map opens with its own Open file button. The map holds up to 100 characters, so a bigger tree has to be split first, and the tool tells you if it is too big.
Made by Friendify Ltd
Free tools from a small London company that builds digital products.