The chart records households, placements and who holds responsibility
An assessment genogram begins with the child and works outwards. Each person is placed in their generation with a birth year, each couple is joined by a union line with its dates, and each child hangs from the parents who gave birth to them. Around that structure the chart records where people actually live. A household is drawn as a group around its members, and a foster home or a kinship home is a temporary household dated from the day the children arrived, with the birth parents still joined to their children by the parent lines.
The legal arrangements sit on the same chart. Supervised contact, court-ordered visitation and legal guardianship are labelled lines between the people they join, so the chart shows that a mother sees her children every Saturday under her own mother’s supervision. Conditions are marked on the person and named in the key printed on every chart.
Kinship care shows the family doing the work as well as the strain
Kinship care asks more of the chart than a placement does, because the carers are also relatives and the strain runs along lines that already exist. The kinship care template draws a grandmother who has held legal guardianship of five grandchildren since 2024 while their mother is still using and their father is in prison. The older sister who parented the younger ones has a caretaker line, and the grandmother, the mother and the index boy form a triangle, in which the grandmother is close but hostile with her daughter and focused negatively on the boy, and the mother is distant from him.
These emotional lines are what a colleague reads first. It is worth drawing only the ties that have been observed or reported by more than one person, and recording the source of each in the notes, because a hostile line between two adults is a judgement that will be read by people who were not in the room.
Caretaker
Close-hostile
Focused on negatively
Distant
Agencies, the court and the school belong on the same chart
A child-welfare case rarely involves one agency. The multi-agency template draws three half-siblings placed across a kinship home and a foster home, with the court, the child welfare agency, the school and a residential treatment centre all on the chart. The case manager and the school counsellor are drawn as people, each joined to the child they see by a labelled line, and the treatment centre is an institutional connection to the mother who is living there. The result does the work of an ecomap, with the supports drawn around the family structure rather than around a single circle.
Household groups, institutions, notes and text are the tools for this. A group can enclose any set of people, an institution connects to anyone, and a note on a person can hold the name of a worker, a court reference or the date of the next review. All of it prints in the key.
A draft from case notes lists every person with its sentence
Case notes are usually written before the chart is drawn, and the draft feature reads them. Paste the chronology into the notes panel and the draft returns every person, union, parent line and emotional line it found, each marked as stated in the notes or inferred from them and each shown with the sentence that supports it. An item that needs a decision is set aside rather than drawn. Nothing reaches the chart until the draft is added, and each of the four follow-up changes arrives as its own card with an undo.
The draft does not know anything that is not in the notes, and it does not decide what the notes leave open. It will not infer that contact is supervised because a grandmother is present. That is the right behaviour for case recording, where an inferred line is a line the worker did not write. A free account drafts five families a month.
Your notes
Ellie Hawkins, born 2009, is the index person and has not attended school since March 2026. She lives with her parents, Paul Hawkins, born 1971, and Helen Hawkins, born 1974, who married in 2003 and are distant from each other, and her brother Jack, born 2006. Paul was married to Dawn Reilly from 1994 until their divorce in 1997 and the two have been cut off since. Paul has been in recovery from alcohol misuse since 2019.
Found in the notes
- Ellie Hawkins, 2009, index
- Paul Hawkins, 1971
- Helen Hawkins, 1974
- Jack Hawkins, 2006
- Paul and Helen, married 2003, distant
- Paul and Dawn Reilly, divorced 1997
- Paul and Dawn, cut off
- Paul, alcohol misuse, in recovery since 2019
On the chart
The social work assessment sheet goes where a laptop does not
Not every visit allows a laptop on the table. The Templates page has a social work assessment sheet as a free PDF and PNG, with the three generations laid out, space for households and agencies, and the key on the sheet. It can be filled in by hand during a visit and typed up afterwards.
From the sheet, write the chronology that evening, let the draft place the people and the lines, review every item against the sheet, and export a PDF for the file. The JSON backup is the copy to keep, because it reopens with the notes and the lines intact when the case is reviewed.
- Draw at the visit
Print the social work assessment sheet and fill in the three generations and the households by hand.
- Write the chronology
Type the people, the dates, the placements and the agency contacts as ordinary sentences.
- Review the draft
Check each person and line against the sheet, and resolve the items the draft set aside.
- Export for the file
Save a PDF for the record and keep the JSON backup for the next review.
Before you decide
Consent and who sees the export
A genogram contains information about people who are not the client, including relatives who have not been asked. Before the chart goes into a report or to another agency, check what your recording policy says about third parties, and remove or anonymise anyone whose details are not relevant to the decision in hand.
What is stated and what is inferred
A chart read in a case conference carries more weight than the notes it came from, so the difference between what you were told and what you concluded should survive the drawing. Dates and placements are usually stated. Emotional lines are usually judgements. Record in the notes who said what, and leave a line off when the evidence for it is one remark.
Working on a shared computer
Work stays in the browser until it is saved to an account, which suits a desk that several workers use, but a chart left open on a shared machine is visible to the next person. Save to your own account or export the JSON and close the tab.
When an ecomap is the better chart
If the assessment is about one person’s supports rather than their family, an ecomap with the person at the centre may be clearer than a genogram with institutions around it. Genogram Builder draws the supports on the family chart rather than offering a separate ecomap.
Open the foster placement template, or paste a chronology and review the draft. One genogram of up to 50 people needs no account.
Open the editor