A genogram records a family as a system rather than as a line of descent
A family tree answers one question, which is who descends from whom. A genogram begins from the same facts, the names, the years of birth and death and the unions between the generations, and then records three further things that a tree has no room for. It records the kind of every union, so that a marriage, a couple who live together, a separation and a divorce are each drawn differently. It records the quality of the relationships between particular people, so that a warm bond, a running conflict and an estrangement are visible as lines. It also records health, with the symbol of each person shaded or coloured for a condition and the cause of death written beside the cross.
The result is a picture of a family as a working system rather than as a list of ancestors. The Hawkins family below is the example that the editor opens with. Eleven people over three generations are drawn with their occupations, four conditions are coloured and five relationship lines run between them. A reader can see that the parents of the client have grown apart, that her grandparents were fused, that her father and his first wife have cut each other off and that her aunt and uncle are in conflict. None of that could be carried by a family tree.
The diagram is read by generation, then by line, then by shading
A genogram is read in a fixed order. The rows come first. Each row is a generation, the oldest at the top, and within a family the brothers and sisters stand from the eldest on the left to the youngest on the right. A square is a man and a circle is a woman, the year of birth is written above the symbol and the age inside it, and a cross through the symbol means that the person has died. The person for whom the chart was drawn, called the index person, has a double outline, and the reader starts there and works outwards.
The lines come second. Black lines are structural. A line that drops from two people and runs beneath them joins a couple, and a vertical line from that couple line down to a symbol is a child. Slashes across a couple line record a separation or a divorce. The coloured lines are emotional, and they are read apart from the structure because they describe a judgement rather than a fact of descent. Two parallel lines mean that two people are close, three that they are fused, a dashed line that they are distant, a zigzag that they are in conflict and a line broken by two bars that they have cut each other off. The shading comes last. The left half of a symbol filled in records a psychological or physical problem, the lower half records alcohol or drug misuse, and the key names the condition.
Close
Distant
Hostile
Cutoff
Caretaker
Therapists, social workers, nurses and students each draw one for a different reason
The diagram was made for family therapy, and that is still where it is most used. A therapist draws one in the first sessions with a client, often on paper and often with the client watching, and the drawing becomes part of the conversation, because people notice patterns on the chart that they had never put into words. Social workers draw one when they assess a household, where the questions are who lives with whom, who looks after whom, which relative could take a child in and which agencies are already involved.
Doctors, nurses and genetic counsellors draw a narrower kind of genogram that is sometimes called a family health history. The emotional lines are often left out, and the attention goes to conditions and to the ages at which they appeared, because a cancer that arrives in three generations before the age of fifty is a different matter from one that arrives once in old age. Students in nursing, social work, counselling and psychology are asked to draw a genogram of their own family as a way of learning the notation, and as a way of noticing what they bring from home into their work with other families.
The notation grew out of family systems therapy and was settled in a book
The genogram came out of the family systems work of Murray Bowen, who treated whole families rather than individuals and who taught his trainees to study the patterns in their own families across several generations. He drew family diagrams for that purpose, and his students carried the practice with them. There was at first no agreed way of drawing one, so a chart made in one clinic could not be read in another without explanation.
Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson settled the notation in the 1980s, when they published a book that gave a single set of symbols and lines and showed them at work on well known families. The book has been revised since, and the edition of 2020, by McGoldrick, Gerson and Sueli Petry, is the source of the notation that this editor draws and that the key on every chart names. The Freud family below is one of the families the book uses to teach the method, drawn here from its figures and from public sources.
A genogram records a judgement made on a particular day
The structural part of a genogram is a matter of record, but the emotional part is an assessment, and an assessment belongs to a date. Two sisters who are close this year may be distant in five years, and a cutoff can be repaired. For that reason a genogram carries the date on which it was drawn, and a therapist who keeps one through a long piece of work redraws the lines as the family changes rather than treating the first chart as final. Anyone reading a genogram drawn by someone else should remember that the lines show what one observer concluded from what they were told.
This is also why the key matters. A chart without a key asks the reader to carry the notation in their head, and a chart with one can be read by a colleague, a supervisor or a member of the family who has never seen a genogram before. A key that lists only what the chart uses is short, and a definition beside each entry removes the last excuse for misreading a line.
Before you decide
How many generations a genogram usually shows
Three is the customary number, which gives the index person, the parents and the grandparents, together with the siblings, partners and children on each row. Three generations are enough to show a pattern repeating, and they are usually as far back as anyone in the room can speak to the quality of the relationships. A medical genogram sometimes goes to a fourth generation when the condition is inherited, and a chart that grows much beyond that stops being readable.
Whether the standard symbols have to be used
Nothing compels it, and a genogram drawn for private reflection can use whatever marks its author likes. The reason to use the standard is that it makes the chart readable by anyone who knows the notation, which includes most therapists, social workers and nursing tutors. A course or an agency will usually ask for McGoldrick, Gerson and Petry by name, and an examiner will expect the key to follow them.
The difference between a genogram and a pedigree chart
A pedigree chart, as used in clinical genetics, shares the squares and circles and the rows by generation, but it has conventions of its own for carriers, affected relatives, consanguinity and the proband, and it never records emotional relationships. A medical genogram uses the genogram notation for structure and health and leaves the emotional lines out when they are not wanted.
Who should see a genogram of a real family
A genogram of a real family holds facts about living people that they did not necessarily agree to have written down, such as a diagnosis, an affair or an estrangement. It should be treated as a clinical record and shown only to those who need it, and a chart made for teaching or supervision should have the names replaced by numbers. The editor has a clinical mode that does this on the chart and in the key.
Open the Hawkins family in the editor and read it with the key beside it, or start a chart of your own. No account is needed to begin.
Open the editor