Author: generationsgenealogyaus

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Sources and resources

Using Canva and Affinity Studio in Family History: 21 Ideas

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Visual storytelling is essential in family history. Whether sharing research findings, preparing publications, or promoting your genealogy business, design tools help you communicate clearly and beautifully.

This post introduces two great graphic design tools, Canva and Affinity Studio, and demonstrates twenty-one practical ways to use them in your family history work.

What is Canva?

Canva is an online design platform that lets you create graphics quickly and easily. It provides thousands of templates for social media posts, posters, presentations, invitations, reports and more.

You can customise colours, fonts, layouts and images without advanced design skills. Canva works wherever you have an internet connection, making it fast and accessible.

The platform includes basic photo-editing tools, AI image generation, brand kits, collaboration features and flexible export options. If you need something quickly or lack extensive design experience, Canva is an excellent choice.

What is Affinity Studio?

The three main tools, or studios, in Affinity Studio are Layout, Vector, and Pixel.

Layout Studio handles page layouts for books, newsletters and reports. Vector Studio creates logos, charts, maps and diagrams. Pixel Studio provides precise image editing and retouching. Use them separately or combine all in one project.

Unlike Canva, Affinity does not include galleries of ready-made templates or images. You import or generate your own content.

Affinity offers fine control over typography, colours, layers, grids and print settings. It supports professional formats including CMYK colour profiles, making it suitable for print-ready publications. Affinity targets users with advanced design skills.

Twenty-One Ways to Use Canva and Affinity Studio in Family History

Below are twenty-one practical ideas for using these tools in your family history projects. Choose the app based on your skills and the nature of the task.

1. Social media posts about your family or research

Share family stories, discoveries or research updates on Facebook, Instagram or Pinterest. I love Canva for social media as it has a wide selection of templates, graphics and images. You can apply your own brand kit to maintain consistency.

2. Restore or enhance family photos

Canva offers basic photo enhancements and an AI tools such as background removal. Use Pixel Studio in Affinity for careful retouching, colour cast correction or repairing small defects.

two black and white images showing a photo before and after editing in Affinity Studio
Before and after photo editing in Affinity Studio
(Subject: Taronga Zoo ferry wharf, Sydney Australia, date and photographer unknown)

3. Gift cards featuring your family

Turn family photos into birthday or holiday cards. These are simple to produce in both tools.

4. Ancestor profiles

Create a snapshot of an ancestor’s life including photos, events, occupations, locations and stories. Share these with relatives or include them in publications.

5. Family newsletters

Use a Canva newsletter template or design your own. Layout Studio in Affinity provides another option for more complex layouts.

6. Family history books

Both tools support book creation from simple to sophisticated. Plan page spreads, design chapter headings, edit images and control typography in Affinity’s Layout Studio or Canva.

7. Locality guides to assist your research

Create a locality guide in either tool for the town, parish or country where your ancestors lived. Include maps, timelines, repositories and links to useful sources.

8. Photobooks or scrapbooks

Canva works well for photobooks and family history scrapbooks. Combine images, captions, stories and themed layouts in a cohesive design.

9. Presentations about your family or research topics

Canva lets you design slides quickly for educational purposes or sharing family stories. Use a template, generate a presentation with AI, or create your own branded slides.

Easily remove backgrounds using Canva’s background remover
(AI tool in the Canva Pro version)

10. Customised family tree charts

Create family tree charts that include exactly the people and information you need. Use Canva or Affinity to customise colours, shapes, line styles, and add images or graphics.

11. Customised maps to illustrate publications

Create maps containing the places and features you need while avoiding copyright issues. Add place markers, migration paths or historical boundaries. Affinity’s Vector Studio is great for map creation.

12. Unique graphics and infographics for blog posts

Create graphics and infographics to illustrate your content. Canva’s infographic templates provide helpful starting points. Use Affinity Vector when you need more precision or complexity.

13. Banner images for social media and websites

Design banner images for Facebook or your website that reflect your personality or business brand. Get inspiration from Canva templates or create custom designs in Affinity.

three images illustrating a banner design, infographic and social media post created in Canva
A sample of graphics created using Canva – banner image, infographic, social media post (two contain AI generated images)

14. AI-generated images when photos don’t exist

Canva Pro includes AI features for creating images when suitable photos don’t exist. Generate scenes representing an ancestor’s occupation, historic locations, or people for presentations and publications. Canva’s AI tools are intuitive and easy to use.

15. Logos for your genealogy business

Design a logo in Affinity’s Vector Studio for fine control over every element, or use Canva’s templates and customisation tools for faster results.

16. Business cards for your genealogy business

Canva offers ready-to-print business card templates. Customise them with your branding or design your own from scratch.

17. Brochures and flyers to promote your services

Design marketing materials for speaking events, consultations or workshops. Keep branding consistent across all formats.

My business flyer, created in Canva

18. Brand and style guides for your genealogy business

Define fonts, colours, image styles and layout rules. Maintain your brand as a Canva brand kit or create a formal document in either Canva or Affinity Studio.

19. Customised templates for business workflows

Create professional, branded templates for invoices, reports and receipts to streamline your genealogy business operations.

20. Worksheets, forms and research templates

Design research plans and logs, checklists, interview sheets, transcription forms and analysis templates tailored to your research needs.

21. Family reunion materials

Prepare for your next family reunion with promotional materials, newsletters, charts, storybooks and more.

Choosing the Right Tool for the Task

Both tools are powerful, but they have different strengths and require different skill levels.

Use Canva when you:

  • need something quickly
  • prefer working with templates
  • want accessible AI tools
  • are new to design.

Use Affinity Studio when you:

  • require precise control over design elements
  • work with CMYK or print-ready formats
  • create detailed diagrams or layered designs
  • have confidence with graphic design tools.

Both tools offer free versions. Canva also has a Canva Pro subscription for additional features. Download Affinity Studio to your computer and log in using your Canva account. If you have a Canva Pro subscription, AI features will be available in Affinity Studio.

Get Started

Canva and Affinity Studio are valuable tools for family history work. They help you create unique designs, share your research and build engaging presentations.

Start small and experiment. Choose the app that suits your skills and the task at hand.

If you want to learn more about using Canva in family history, Jane Hutcheon is giving a presentation on Canva essentials for the Society of Australian Genealogists on 3 December.

For more of my articles on documenting your family history, go to the Document page.

About the Author

Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists.

Methodology

Why Genealogists Must Research Places, Not Just People

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When you research family history, it’s natural to focus on people. Their names, dates, and relationships. Yet behind every individual is a place: a town, a parish, a street, even a single house. These places shaped your ancestors’ lives, created the sources you now consult, and influenced the decisions they made.

Understanding locations isn’t a side project in genealogy. It’s central to doing thorough, accurate research. Here are five reasons why studying places is just as important as studying people.

1. Places Guide You to the Right Sources

Sources are usually tied to a location. Knowing where your family lived helps you identify what sources exist, who created them, and where they’re now held.

Take civil registration as an example. In England, civil registration of births, marriages, and deaths began in 1837, though compliance was patchy until 1875. In New South Wales, Australia, it started on 1 March 1856, while Tasmania commenced earlier on 1 December 1838. If you’re researching before these dates, you must turn to church registers for baptisms, marriages, and burials.

The same applies to other sources: newspapers, land deeds, school registers, or hospital archives. Knowing the local religious denominations or administrative boundaries will help you identify which institutions created sources and which repositories now hold them.

One of my family’s churches – St George the Martyr Church, Southwark, England
(my photo, 2024 – AI used to lighten the sky as it was a grey gloomy day!)

2. Places Help You Interpret Sources Accurately

Even when you have the right source, place knowledge helps you interpret it correctly. Words, occupations, and personal names may have different meanings in different places. Local history can also alert you to language differences. Were the records in English, Latin, German, or Gaelic?

Place research is also a valuable problem-solving tool. Consider this example: I was tracing a couple who lived in Tumut, New South Wales. Their civil registration records showed children born every 18 months in Tumut. Then I found another child recorded with the same parent names, but in Morpeth. A quick map search showed the two towns were 566 kilometres apart. In the 1850s, such a distance was significant. The discovery didn’t prove the child wasn’t theirs, but it told me I needed more detailed research before drawing conclusions.

Place knowledge adds that essential layer of caution and clarity.

3. Places Reveal the Context Behind Life Events

Family history isn’t lived in isolation. Migration patterns, wars, local industries, epidemics, and religious or cultural tensions all shaped your ancestors’ lives. Studying the history of a place allows you to understand not only what happened to your family but why it may have happened.

If your ancestor left Ireland in the late 1840s, knowledge of the Great Famine and its impact on different counties will help explain that decision. Or if your family lived near a new railway line, it may account for sudden changes in occupation, travel, or marriage networks.

Local context turns information into meaningful history.

4. Places Change Over Time And So Do Sources

Today’s map isn’t the same as yesterday’s. Boundaries shift, towns merge, names change, and entire communities can disappear. Without understanding these changes, it’s easy to misinterpret a source or not find it at all.

A single locality may appear under different names at different times. When researching my father’s family I had to learn how parts of Essex in England became absorbed into London. And while researching my mother’s family I discovered that Evan in New South Wales became known as Castlereagh and later Penrith.

Wars, floods, and infrastructure projects can also erase or alter landscapes.

Recognising these changes allows you to follow your family across time and place.

5. Places Provide Living Stories

Perhaps the most rewarding reason to study locations is how they enrich your storytelling. A family tree filled with names and dates is important, but it’s the detail of place that makes ancestors real.

Learning about their neighbourhood, the schools they attended, the churches they worshipped in, the farms they worked, or the streets they walked, lets you imagine daily life. You can weave social history into your narrative: Was the town growing or declining? What industries employed most people? Did local events bring communities together or divide them?

Adding these layers can create a vivid narrative. Place knowledge enables you to tell stories that resonate not only with you but with others who read your research.

The River Thames near Twickenham (west of London, England), where my watermen plied their trade in the 18th and 19th centuries (my photo, 2024)

Moving Forward

Genealogy is always about people, but people are inseparable from places. Understanding the towns, parishes, and landscapes where your family lived helps you find sources, interpret them accurately, place events in context, follow families through boundary and place name changes, and bring their lives to life.

By studying places as well as people, you’ll build a richer, more accurate, and more engaging family history.

Find out how to research places using my 8-step research process for places: Studying Locations: Researching Places for Genealogy.

Note: My other blog posts about researching places are currently being revised. I will add links to the updated posts when they are available.

About the Author

Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists.

Methodology

Create a Master Genealogy Research Plan in Excel

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Are you juggling multiple research plans and struggling to see the big picture of your family history research? If you’ve been using separate plans for each family group or project, you might be missing opportunities to work more strategically.

A master genealogy research plan consolidates all your research into a single, comprehensive Excel workbook. This approach gives you an overview of your entire research landscape, helps you identify gaps and priorities, and makes it easier to plan your next steps efficiently.

In my article How to Create a Research Plan in Excel, I showed you how to develop individual research plans for each family group. That method works well, you might find you need a broader perspective to research strategically. A master plan addresses this need by bringing everything together in one place.

What is a Research Plan and What are the Benefits?

A genealogy research plan identifies:

  • the questions that you want to answer
  • the hypotheses you want to test
  • the information that you need, and
  • the tasks you need to undertake.

Use your research plan to track your progress, pick up where you left off, record the sources used and document a summary of your findings. A research plan supplements the main documentation in your family history software or online family tree.

Why Create a Master Plan?

Having multiple research plans worked for me for many years. But it became difficult to plan my family history research as a whole. I needed a way to get an overview of my entire research, identify gaps and priorities, and work strategically across all my family lines.

Previously, I developed various separate tools for these purposes: a research index, the Tree Health Assessment Tool, and a BDM index to track birth, death and marriage records. While these tools were helpful, they created their own management challenges.

The alternative approach is to combine these tools into a single master plan. Having one plan keeps all your information together. You’re less likely to lose documents or information, and you can work more strategically. It’s also easier to take your plan with you when you go out to research.

I currently use Notion for my master plan, but I want to demonstrate how you can create a master plan in Excel for those who prefer spreadsheets or don’t use Notion.

How to Structure Your Master Genealogy Research Plan

This master plan uses six worksheets, each with a specific function. Keeping related information together in one workbook aids planning and prevents information from getting scattered across multiple files.

Sheet 1: Research Index

The research index provides a summary of key research questions or status for each family group in your tree.

Excel columns are designed for filtering, so separate your data based on how you might want to filter it.

Column setup:

  • Column A — Family. List family groups using the surnames of both spouses. Each row represents a different family group.
  • Column B — Grandparent line. Assign each family group to one of your four grandparent lines. Use your grandparents’ surnames. Mine are: Everett (father’s father), Flanagan (father’s mother), Hend (mother’s father) and Rusten (mother’s mother).
  • Column C — Generation. Assign each family group to their generation. You are generation 1, your parents are 2, your grandparents are 3, and so on (see sheet 6).
  • Column D — ID. Add unique identifier numbers for the couples. I use the RIN from my family history software.
  • Column E — Key research questions or status. Add the most important research question for that family group. You don’t need content for every family group. Update this regularly as your research progresses.
  • Column F — Rating. Assign a complexity rating to the research required. This helps you choose which family to work on based on available time. See the key on Sheet 6.

Filtering example: To see all family groups on just one grandparent line, filter Column B for that grandparent’s surname.

Sheet 2: Evidence

This sheet stores the table format of your Tree Health Assessment. It provides a summary of evidence strength for key information or events for each family group.

This assessment helps you identify where your research foundation is strongest and where it needs reinforcement. For instructions on creating this assessment, see my article How to Apply the Family Tree Health Assessment Tool.

Extract from a sample Tree Health Assessment Table in Excel, with rows for family groups and columns indicating the strength of evidence for key facts and events
Extract from a sample Tree Health Assessment Table

Sheet 3: Plan and Log

This is the main sheet containing all your research questions, hypotheses and tasks.

Column setup:

  • Column A — Grandparent line. Use your four grandparents’ surnames.
  • Column B — Generation. Assign each question, hypothesis or task to the relevant generation.
  • Column C — ID. Add unique identifier numbers for the person(s) relevant to the question, hypothesis or task.
  • Column D — Surname. Insert the surname of the person relevant to the question, hypothesis or task.
  • Column E — Ref. no. Assign a unique number to each question, hypothesis or task. Tasks attach to either a question or hypothesis as sub-numbers. Add the first letter of the grandparent line to the number, and restart numbering for each grandparent line.
  • Column F — Your research question, hypothesis or task. Write the question, hypothesis or task in this column.
  • Column G — Category. Categorise as question, hypothesis or task.
  • Column H — Status. Open (O) or Closed (C).
  • Column I — Sources to examine & repositories
  • Column J — Sources used & citation
  • Column K — Notes
  • Column L — Analysis
  • Column M — Transcript or extract
Extract from a sample master genealogy research plan in Excel, sheet 3, demonstrating columns A-H
Extract from a sample master genealogy research plan, sheet 3, demonstrating columns A-H

If you wish, you can add more columns for information that might assist your research planning. For example, you could add a column for country and then filter all research for that location. Or add a column for subjects such as convicts or immigration to group related research topics together.

Sheet 4: Surnames

In my article Create a Surname Tree to Organise Your Family History, I showed how to create a tree providing an overview of surnames in your family tree and which line they belong to. This serves as a useful research tool.

On this sheet, either insert an image of your surname tree or create a table version instead.

a table with a column for each grandparent line, listing the surnames that appear on that line
Example surname table, by grandparent line

Sheet 5: BDM Index

In my article Using Excel to Track Birth, Death and Marriage Records, I demonstrated a spreadsheet for tracking vital records you need and those you’ve already obtained. This index helps you plan and prioritise record purchases while ensuring you don’t waste money on duplicates.

Add this index to Sheet 5 of your master plan to keep all your planning tools in one place.

Sheet 6: Key

Use this sheet to list explanations, abbreviations and keys for your other sheets.

Research complexity ratings for Sheet 1:

  • 1 Significant research question or problem
  • 2 Needs research to progress further or relationships not proven
  • 3 Needs research but only to tidy things up. Not essential to progress further
  • 0 No work currently needed. All relationships sufficiently proven
  • 4 Previous generations need to be proven first

Generation key:

  • 1 me
  • 2 parents
  • 3 grandparents
  • 4 great grandparents
  • 5 2x great grandparents
  • 6 3x great grandparents
  • 7 4x great grandparents
  • 8 5x great grandparents
  • 9 6x great grandparents
  • 10 7x great grandparents
  • 11 8x great grandparents

Tree Health Assessment colours for Sheet 2:

  • Green: Strong evidence
  • Yellow: Some evidence, insufficient
  • Red: No evidence or not researched
  • Grey: Not applicable

Working Strategically With Your Master Plan

The power of a master plan lies in its ability to help you work strategically across your entire family history. Use the filtering features to do things such as:

  • Focus on one grandparent line at a time
  • Identify all open research tasks across your tree
  • Find families with brick wall problems based on complexity ratings
  • Plan research trips by filtering for specific locations or repositories.

The interconnected nature of the sheets means you can move between high-level planning (Sheet 1) and detailed research tracking (Sheet 3), while keeping supporting tools like your BDM index readily accessible.

Try a Master Genealogy Research Plan

A master genealogy research plan helps you coordinate your research and work more systematically. By consolidating your planning tools into a single Excel workbook, you gain the overview needed to make informed decisions about where to focus your research time and energy.

Start by setting up the six sheets outlined above, then gradually migrate your existing research questions and tasks into the master plan format. You don’t need to complete everything at once and you don’t need to include everyone who is in your family tree. Build your master plan incrementally as you work on different family lines.

For more articles and information about using Excel in family history, head to the Excel page. You can also download your free copies of my Excel guides on my Free Stuff page. A guide about this master plan (with examples) will be available for download soon.

About the Author

Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists.

Methodology

12 Easy Ways to Collaborate in Family History

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Family history research is more fun and rewarding when you share the experience with others.

Working with others brings real benefits to your research. You can share information, photographs, and research clues. You learn from others’ experience and avoid common pitfalls. You enjoy the social side of genealogy and celebrate successes together. And, importantly, you support groups and organisations that help all genealogists succeed.

Here are 12 easy ways to start collaborating in your family history research.

Connect with Family and Friends

Talk to relatives and ask them to share stories or documents. Start with a phone call or visit. Ask about family photographs, letters, or documents they might have. Even relatives who “don’t know much” often have valuable memories or items tucked away.

Share your findings with family. Create simple summaries, photo books, or family tree charts. These don’t need to be perfect or comprehensive. A single-page outline of what you’ve discovered can spark interest and encourage others to contribute.

Join Groups and Societies

Join a family history society and attend their events. Societies offer workshops, lectures, access to resources, and other services. You’ll meet experienced researchers who can offer guidance and support.

Volunteer to help at a society. Contributing your time helps the genealogy community while building your skills. You might help with collections, organise events, or work library rosters.

Join a special interest group. Look for groups focused on your specific research interests. These might centre on convicts, military history, or particular countries or regions. Specialised groups offer targeted expertise you won’t find elsewhere.

group of people working together at a desk

Share Your Research Online

Start a family history blog or website to share your stories. You don’t need to be a professional writer. Simple posts about your discoveries, research challenges, or family stories help others with similar research. Readers may reach out with information or helpful suggestions.

Join a Facebook group or other online genealogy community. Facebook hosts genealogy groups organised by location, surname, or research interest. These communities are generous with advice and often help solve research puzzles through crowdsourced knowledge.

Contribute to WikiTree. This collaborative family tree platform connects researchers working on the same family lines. You can add to existing profiles or create new ones. The community supports high quality research and social interaction.

Join FamilySearch and add to their free collaborative tree. FamilySearch’s Family Tree allows multiple users to contribute to the same profiles. This creates opportunities to connect with distant cousins and share research responsibilities.

Contribute to Projects

Take part in an indexing project. Indexing makes historical records searchable for all researchers. You can transcribe records from the comfort of your home. Each document you index helps thousands of family historians find their ancestors.

Example: Volunteers indexing at FamilySearch has helped millions of people with their research.

Help with transcription projects at your state, national library or archive. Many cultural institutions run volunteer transcription programs. These projects preserve historical documents while making them accessible to researchers. Your contribution helps the entire genealogy community.

Example: You can find transcription projects from many countries on From the Page.

Join in challenges or competitions run by genealogy groups. WikiTree runs regular challenges that encourage specific types of research. These might focus on improving profiles from particular time periods or locations. Challenges make routine tasks more engaging while improving the collaborative tree.

Four types of ways to collaborate in family history
How to collaborate in family history

Tips for Getting Started

Pick one or two ways that appeal to you. Don’t feel you have to participate in everything at once. Start small and find what works best for your research style and schedule.

Keep it simple. A single conversation with a relative, a short blog post, or one indexing project can make a real difference. Small contributions often lead to unexpected discoveries and connections.

For more tips on getting started with family history, check out my post What You Need to Know When Starting Family History.

Who could you collaborate with this week?

Choose one approach from this list and take that first step. The genealogy community is waiting to welcome you and share the adventure of discovering your family’s story.

About the Author

Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists.

Maintenance

How to Manage Multiple Family Trees to Benefit Your Research

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Many genealogists have family trees on sites such as Ancestry and MyHeritage, and also in family history software on their computer. While multiple family trees have powerful research advantages, they can quickly become a liability if poorly managed.

Inconsistent information between trees wastes research time and prevents you achieving your research objectives. Outdated data leads you down wrong paths. Missing documentation undermines your credibility. The solution isn’t fewer trees. It’s better family tree management.

This guide shows you how to maintain multiple genealogy trees effectively, keeping them accurate, consistent, and useful for your research.

Note: This post only deals with multiple trees about the same family. It does not cover situations where you may have different unrelated trees for clients or friends.

Why Genealogists Use Multiple Family Trees

Different platforms serve different research purposes:

Commercial genealogy websites like Ancestry and MyHeritage offer vast record collections. Having a family tree on these platforms helps you find new information and sources.

DNA testing company websites provide tools for analysing genetic matches. Your family tree is key to understanding how you connect with DNA matches.

Desktop genealogy software gives you comprehensive research tools, detailed reporting options, and control over your data format and privacy.

Collaborative family trees like FamilySearch and WikiTree connect you with other researchers working on the same families and can help you solve research problems.

Each platform has strengths. The challenge lies in managing family tree data across all of them to keep obtaining the benefits.

The benefits and alternatives are discussed in my blog post, Where’s the Best Place to Put Your Family Tree.

The Costs of Poor Family Tree Management

Inconsistencies between your family trees can create serious research problems.

You can waste hours or months investigating leads based on incorrect information. You may miss out on research leads because your online tree lacks recent updates. And the stories or presentations that you base on your family tree will be vague or incorrect.

Inaccurate family trees can also mislead other researchers, as they copy your mistakes and spread inaccurate genealogy information.

Core Principles of Managing Multiple Family Trees

Effective family tree management rests on four foundations:

  • Accuracy: Names, dates, places and relationships must be correct.
  • Documentation: Include quality source citations and supporting evidence in research notes.
  • Consistency: Information must match between your trees.
  • Security: Regular backups to protect your research from loss.

These principles guide decisions about maintaining your family trees.

Refer to my blog post Create an Accurate Family Tree by Fixing Errors for more on accuracy.

Step 1: Designate Your Master Family Tree

Choose one family tree as your master family tree. This becomes the most complete, most accurate version of your research.

I recommend using family history software for your master tree. Programs like Legacy Family Tree, Family Tree Maker or RootsMagic offer extensive organisation tools, great source management and complete data control.

Your master tree should contain:

  • Every person you’ve researched
  • Full source citations for all information
  • Digital copies of important documents and photographs
  • Research notes and conclusions.

All other trees become working trees. These are extracts or subsets of your master tree designed for specific research purposes.

Step 2: Establish a Master Tree Maintenance Routine

Your master tree requires regular attention, even when you are not actively researching.

Immediate updates: When you discover new information on any platform, update your master tree straight away. This prevents the accumulation of inconsistencies.

For example, if you find someone in a census record on Ancestry:

  1. add it to your Ancestry tree
  2. copy the information to your master family tree on your computer
  3. download a copy of the census to your computer
  4. attach that file to the person in your master family tree.

Research focused updates: When you sit down to work on a specific family or research problem, it’s a good idea to check and correct anything related to that family or research problem in your master tree and the relevant working tree before you do more research.

Weekly maintenance: Spend about 30 minutes each week reviewing and improving your master family tree. Check for obvious errors, add missing source citations, enhance documentation for one family line, remove or merge duplicate profiles.

Monthly deep cleaning: Choose one surname or family group for thorough review. Verify all dates and places. Ensure every piece of information has proper documentation. Look for gaps in your research.

This systematic approach maintains data quality and prevents overwhelming cleanup tasks.

flow diagram illustrating the process of updating your master family tree and working trees, to keep them consistent

Step 3: Synchronise Your Working Trees

Create Update Schedules

Establish regular intervals for synchronising your working trees with your master tree. The frequency depends on your research activity:

  • Daily researchers: Weekly updates
  • Weekend genealogists: Monthly updates
  • Casual researchers: Quarterly updates

Document your last update date for each tree to maintain accountability.

Focus Updates by Platform

Rather than trying to update everything simultaneously, rotate focus between platforms:

  • Month 1: Update your Ancestry tree with new master tree information
  • Month 2: Review and update DNA testing company trees
  • Month 3: Update your WikiTree profiles

This approach makes updates manageable while ensuring nothing gets neglected long-term.

Software-Specific Syncing

Some genealogy programs offer automated syncing features:

Family Tree Maker allows you to synchronise family trees in your desktop software and on Ancestry, and can save significant time.

Legacy Family Tree offers FamilySearch synchronisation, but it works differently as it is a collaborative tree. Synchronising is best done one profile at a time with selective amendments to ensure accuracy.

Step 4: Implement Cross Referencing Between Family Trees

Cross-referencing helps you navigate between trees quickly and maintain consistency between individual profiles.

In Your Master Tree

 Add custom facts or notes containing platform identifiers:

  • FamilySearch person IDs
  • WikiTree person IDs
  • Stable URLs to person profiles in an Ancestry or MyHeritage family tree.

More information: How to Use FamilySearch Person IDs and WikiTree ID

In Your Working Trees

Add private notes containing your master tree person numbers. This creates bidirectional linking between all your trees.

Example: Legacy Family Tree software assigns a unique RIN to each person (Record Identification Numbers). Learn how to find them in this article from Legacy.

Create a Management Plan

Managing multiple family trees requires you to remember which platforms you have a tree and when they were last updated. Consider a spreadsheet or Notion project plan to list your trees and track your maintenance.

Step 5: Implement a Back Up Plan

Your master tree deserves the most protection:

  • Configure automatic backups within your genealogy software
  • Create weekly manual backups to external storage
  • Store monthly backups in cloud storage or off-site locations.

Working Tree Backups

Working tree backups should be unnecessary, if you keep your master plan backed up. However, you can download GEDCOM files from online trees for added security. While GEDCOMs don’t include media files, they preserve your basic family structure and can be used to recreate trees if needed.

Note: Collaborative trees like FamilySearch and WikiTree don’t offer GEDCOM downloads.

Step 6: Using GEDCOM Files Strategically

A GEDCOM file is a great way to create a new research tree, but it is not a good tool for updating existing ones.

Be careful to privatise information on living people or sensitive information before uploading a GEDCOM file to create an online family tree.

Common Family Tree Management Mistakes to Avoid

Neglecting the master tree: Working trees receive attention while the master tree stagnates, undermining the entire system.

Inconsistent update schedules: Sporadic updates lead to confusion about which information is current.

Skipping backups: Hardware failures and platform changes can destroy years of work.

Creating Your Family Tree Management Action Plan

Start implementing better tree management:

This week: Choose your master tree and document your current working trees

This month: Establish your update schedule and start adding cross-references between trees

Ongoing: Follow your maintenance routines and backup procedures.

Consistency matters more than perfection. A simple system has greater chance of being implemented.

Multiple family trees boost your research power when managed properly. Start with your master tree designation and improve your system gradually.

About the Author

Danielle Lautrec is a genealogy educator, researcher, and author of The Good Genealogist. With qualifications in history, family history, and historical archaeology, she teaches for the Society of Australian Genealogists.