Blank Genogram Template
Click any symbol to add a name, birth and death years, or a note. Add and delete people to match the family in front of you — the structure below is a starting point, not a constraint.
Drag people to arrange. Click a person to edit their details.
Editable preview — your changes aren't saved here.
- Add people with the ▢ ◯ ◇ buttons, then click the canvas.
- Use Connect… for marriages, children, and emotional lines.
- Click a person to edit name, years, deceased, notes.
- Drag to arrange, or hit Auto-arrange.
- Export as PNG or PDF — the legend builds itself.
Includes a title block and an auto-generated legend of the symbols you used.
Your genogram autosaves in your browser. Get our symbol cheat sheet + templates by email so you can pick it up anywhere:
What is on the sheet
The blank grid uses 5 of the 19 entries this tool can auto-label in a legend, and that spareness is the point: square for male, circle for female, and the neutral symbol for children whose sex you have not set yet, plus the marriage line and the biological drop line. Everything expressive — deceased, adopted, foster, close, distant, conflict, cutoff — is deliberately absent, because those marks are statements about a specific family and a blank template should not make them for you.
Structurally it gives you 3 couple lines, 5 drop lines, and 9 people arranged over 3 rows. Print it and you have a form. Fill it in on screen and you have a working diagram that keeps its lines attached when you move somebody.
Filling it in, top row first
- Grandparents. Start at the top with the four grandparents and their marriages. Working downward is easier than working outward, because each generation is defined by the one above it.
- Parents. Fill the middle row, then correct the couple line: marriage, separation, divorce or cohabitation are four different lines and the difference is the information.
- Children. Rename the bottom row, set each child's sex, and delete the spare slots or add more. Change the drop line where a child is adopted or fostered.
- Dates and the index person. Birth years, death years and the deceased mark turn the sheet into a chronology. Mark the person the genogram is about with the index outline so a reader knows whose diagram this is.
- Relationships last. The emotional layer goes on after the structure is right, and it is the layer worth thinking hardest about. See the symbols reference for every available line.
Printing it blank
If the point is a paper form — a home visit, an intake interview, a classroom exercise — export the PDF straight away, before filling anything in, and print that. The exported sheet carries a title block and a legend built from the marks on the diagram, so a blank sheet prints with a short legend rather than the whole notation set, which is the right amount of instruction for someone filling it in with a pen. Free exports carry a small "Made with genogram-maker.com" footer watermark.
One practical note for interviews: people volunteer family history to a diagram they can see far more readily than to a form with boxes. Filling the sheet in front of someone, and letting them correct you, tends to produce a better genogram than filling it in afterwards from your notes.
When a blank template is the wrong starting point
When the family is not shaped like the grid. A single-parent household, a blended family after remarriage, or a child living with grandparents will all take more work to force into this structure than to start from one that already matches. The genogram templates page has pre-connected structures for family therapy, family health history and social work assessment, and the genogram generator page explains how the layout gets rebuilt for you once you have loaded any of them. If you would rather see finished diagrams before starting, the genogram examples narrate the notation symbol by symbol, and the 3-generation genogram guide goes deeper on why three is the standard depth.
Related pages
The full editor is the genogram maker home page; the online genogram maker page covers using it on a managed school or work machine, and the free genogram maker page sets out what costs nothing. For the notation itself, keep the genogram key to hand, and for the build order read how to make a genogram. If you need to hand the blank sheet to a colleague who works in Word, making a genogram in Word covers that route and its limits.
Blank genogram template FAQ
›What is a blank genogram template?
It is the skeleton of a genogram with none of the content: the symbols and the lines connecting them are drawn, and every name, date and note is empty. You fill it in with a real family, either on screen or on paper after printing it. It saves the part of the job that is identical for every family — the structure — and leaves the part that is not.
›How do I print a blank genogram template?
Export it as a PDF from the editor on this page and print that. The export is A4 with a title block and a legend, so the printed sheet explains its own notation to anyone who picks it up. Printing the PDF rather than the web page is what keeps the symbols crisp and correctly scaled.
›How many generations should a blank template have?
Three is the working standard, and it is what this template gives you: the person or index family, their parents, and their grandparents. Assignments and clinical assessments almost always ask for three. Go to four when the question is inheritance — a hereditary condition or a pattern of estrangement repeating down a line.
›What if my family does not fit the template?
Very few do, and that is expected. The blank grid assumes two grandparent couples, one couple in the middle generation, and three children, because that is the most common starting shape. Add, delete and reconnect people to match reality — single parents, remarriages, half-siblings and children who live with grandparents are all normal, and each has its own notation.
›Can students use this for an assignment?
Yes. Fill it in, export a PNG to drop into a document or a PDF to submit or print. Marks in social work, nursing and counselling coursework usually go to the interpretation rather than the drawing, so leave time for the write-up and make sure your legend matches the marks you actually used.