Cultural Genogram

Where the cultural genogram comes from

The cultural genogram was introduced by Kenneth Hardy and Tracey Laszloffy as a way of training culturally competent family therapists. Their argument was that clinicians cannot work usefully across cultural difference until they have examined their own cultural inheritance — so the tool is applied reflexively, to the trainee's family, before it is ever applied to a client's.

Structurally it is an ordinary genogram: same shapes, same union and child lines, same emotional layer. What changes is what you annotate and what you then ask about it.

What to annotate

• Origin. Country, region, or ethnic group for each person in the oldest generation you can reach — the more specific the better, since "European" hides what "Sicilian" explains.
• Migration. Year, direction, and whether it was chosen or forced. Generation of arrival is often the single most explanatory annotation on the page.
• Language. What each person spoke, and crucially where transmission stopped. A monolingual generation between two bilingual ones is usually a story.
• Religion and observance. Affiliation, conversions, intermarriage across faiths, and lapses.
• Identification. How each person named themselves, which can differ sharply from how others would categorise them — and differ between generations of the same family.

Reading the example

In the fictional family above, Salvatore and Concetta migrated from Sicily in 1957; their son Anthony was born in the United States and speaks English only. On the other side, Emeka and Ngozi are Igbo, with Ngozi arriving in 1979 and her daughter Adaeze arriving as a child and growing up bilingual. Their daughter Nina is third generation on one side and second on the other, and identifies with both.

The annotations make two things visible that a plain genogram would not. Language transmission broke in one generation on the paternal side and held on the maternal side. And the emotional lines land on exactly those seams — closeness between Anthony and the grandmother who kept the Italian household, distance between Adaeze and the father who stayed behind longest.

Questions the diagram is for

Once it is drawn, the useful work is interrogating it. Which parts of the culture were carried forward, and by whom? What was deliberately dropped in order to assimilate, and at whose cost? Where does the family disagree about who they are? Which of these inheritances is a source of pride, and which of shame — Hardy and Laszloffy make those two specifically worth naming. And, for a clinician: which of these would you be most and least comfortable being asked about by a client?

Presenting it

Cultural genograms are usually presented rather than filed, so legibility matters. Keep notes short enough to read at a distance, export a PDF with the legend attached, and be ready to talk about the annotations rather than reading them aloud. Related variants: the career genogram applies the same annotation approach to occupational inheritance, and the ecomap maps the family's current external supports. For the base notation, see the symbols reference, and for the structural walkthrough, 3-generation genogram.

Cultural genogram FAQ