How to Prepare a Family Tree for a Family Reunion

Ideas for using a family tree at a reunion: which chart to print, how to collect corrections on the day, name badges with generation numbers and a follow-up plan.

A family reunion is the best day of the year for a family historian. Everyone you have been researching, or their children, is in one room, and they want to see what you have found. With a little preparation the day fills gaps that years of archives cannot.

Choose the right chart

For a reunion of the descendants of one couple, print a descendant chart with that couple at the top and spouses beside each descendant. Every guest can find their own box and count the generations up to the founders. If the reunion is for a wider family, a large all-relatives chart centred on a living elder works, but it gets big quickly; see our printing guide for sizes.

Print more than one copy

• One large poster on a wall or an easel, where people gather and point.
• A few A3 copies on tables so that older relatives can sit and read.
• A4 handouts of the branch each family belongs to, so that they can take something home.

Put the founders at eye level

On a tall chart, hang it so that the oldest generation is at standing eye level and the youngest near the floor, where the children who belong there will happily lie down and search for their names.

Collect corrections on the day

Pin a pencil to the poster with a string and invite everyone to write directly on it: a missing middle name, a corrected date, a spouse you did not know about. A second person with a notebook should walk around asking who is missing? You will come home with dozens of additions. Photograph the annotated poster before you take it down.

Name badges with generation numbers

Print badges that say the person's name and their number on the chart, for example Ewa Nowak, generation 4, line of Anna. It gives strangers something to talk about and lets people find each other on the wall.

Bring the documents

A table with copies of a few striking records (the founders' marriage record, a passenger list, an old photograph with the people identified) draws a crowd. Ask people to bring their own old photographs and photograph them on the spot with a phone; write down who is in the picture while the owner is standing next to you.

Record the elders

Set up a quiet corner with a chair and a phone recorder and ask the oldest relatives to tell one story each. Fifteen minutes per person, using our interview questions. Those recordings become the best chapters of the family book.

After the reunion

1. Enter every correction into your master tree within a week, citing family reunion, 20 June 2026, told by … as the source.
2. Export a new GEDCOM and generate an updated chart.
3. Send the updated chart as a PDF to everyone who attended, with a note of thanks and a list of the questions that remain.

The chart you send afterwards will be more complete than the one you brought, and the relatives who corrected it will feel that it is theirs too. That is how a family history becomes a family project.