Drawing a Family Health History: A Practical Guide
How to collect and draw a three-generation family health history: what to ask relatives, how to record conditions and relationships, and how to turn it into a pedigree chart.
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A family health history is the cheapest, most powerful screening tool most families never write down. Here’s the practical path from “I should do this” to a chart you can actually use.
Start with the three-generation standard
The medical standard is a minimum of three generations: the person, parents/siblings, and grandparents (plus aunts, uncles, and first cousins when possible). Three generations is enough to see most dominant patterns and many recessive ones.
The questions that matter
- For each relative: sex, birth year, living or deceased (and age/cause if deceased).
- Conditions: cancer, heart disease, diabetes, mental health conditions, birth defects, intellectual disability, and anything that runs in the family.
- Age at diagnosis — early onset is the most important detail and the most often forgotten.
- Who is related to whom — including half-siblings, adoptions, and consanguineous unions.
Ask the oldest relatives first; they hold the generation you can’t recreate.
Turn it into a chart
Write the skeleton first — parents, partners, children — then add health marks. You don’t need to decide the inheritance pattern while drawing; the chart reveals it.
This is exactly the workflow the maker is built for:
- Open the three-generation template.
- Rename the people (or use the blank template and add your own).
- Shade affected people, mark deceased and probands.
- Export a printable PDF for the family binder or the doctor’s office.
Privacy is the whole point
A family health history is among the most sensitive documents you’ll own. Keep it on your own device — which is what the maker does by design: everything is stored locally in your browser, nothing is uploaded. You decide what to print, what to share, and with whom.
Update it
Health histories are living documents. Revisit the chart every few years — new diagnoses appear, and the pattern that looked unclear at two generations often resolves at three.
Not a medical tool, note the fine print: a family health history supports conversations with health professionals; it doesn’t replace them. See our terms.