Genogram Maker

Genograms for Social Work

A social work genogram is a three-generation family diagram used in assessment to record who is in the household, who has cared for the child and when, and how the relationships between them actually run. It uses the same notation as a clinical genogram, but the facts it carries are different: placement and its date, separation, bereavement, adoption, non-residence, and cut-off. Draw it early, keep it in the file, and redraw it when the household changes — a genogram that still shows last year's placement is worse than none. Pair it with an ecomap when the assessment also needs the services and supports around the family.

The editor below is loaded with a fictional casework assessment: a kinship placement after a parent's death, a separated non-resident father, and an adopted younger sibling. Edit it into your own case, or clear it and start from scratch.

Saved

Drag people to arrange. Click a person to edit their details.

Wesley1952–2019Doreenb. 1955Kinship carerMarcusb. 1978Non-residentRachel1980–2021Kaylab. 2011Placed 2021Isaiahb. 2014Nevaehb. 2017Adopted 2020

Editable preview — your changes aren't saved here.

Quick start
  1. Add people with the ▢ ◯ ◇ buttons, then click the canvas.
  2. Use Connect… for marriages, children, and emotional lines.
  3. Click a person to edit name, years, deceased, notes.
  4. Drag to arrange, or hit Auto-arrange.
  5. Export as PNG or PDF — the legend builds itself.
Export
includes watermark

Includes a title block and an auto-generated legend of the symbols you used.

Finish this later?

Your genogram autosaves in your browser. Get our symbol cheat sheet + templates by email so you can pick it up anywhere:

Why the notation load is heaviest in social work

Count the marks on the diagram above. It uses 11 of the 19 entries this tool's exporter can auto-label in a legend — deceased, index person, marriage, separation, biological child, adopted child, close, distant and cut-off among them. That ties it with the family-therapy sample for the densest of the eleven templates built into the editor, and it is only seven people.

That is the practical difference between a social work genogram and a family tree. A family tree needs births, marriages and deaths. An assessment needs those plus the placement route, the legal status of each child, and the relationship quality that explains why a placement is holding or not. Every one of those is a distinct mark, and the reader of your file has to be able to decode all of them — which is why the export on this page builds the legend from the marks you actually used rather than dumping the whole notation set on the page.

What to put on it

  • Three generations minimum. Grandparents matter in child and family work because they are the most common kinship carers and the most common source of informal support.
  • Household boundary. Who sleeps there. Note it against each person — "in home", "non-resident", "placed 2021" — because household membership rarely matches the biological structure.
  • Legal status per child. Biological, adopted, fostered, kinship. Each has its own drop line, and getting it wrong changes the meaning of the diagram.
  • Dates. Birth, death, separation, and above all placement dates. A date turns a diagram into chronology.
  • Relationship quality. Close, distant, conflicted, cut off. This is the layer that carries your professional judgement, so it is also the layer to be most careful and most explicit about.

How it gets used in an assessment

Most practitioners draw it during or straight after the first home visit, from what the family said rather than from records, and then correct it against the file. Drawing it with the family present is itself an intervention — people volunteer history to a diagram they can see that they would not volunteer to a form, and disagreements about who belongs on it are usually informative.

After that it does three jobs: it is the fastest possible briefing for anyone picking up the case, it makes gaps visible (an entire branch with no dates is a question you have not asked yet), and in supervision it is the artefact you reason over. A supervisor can see an unexplored paternal line in two seconds on a diagram and not at all in six pages of prose.

Students and placement portfolios

If this is coursework, the marks usually go to the interpretation rather than the drawing: what the pattern shows, what you would explore next, and what you cannot yet know. Include a legend, keep the diagram legible at print size, and say explicitly which parts are reported by the family and which are corroborated. For the notation itself, the genogram symbols reference and the one-page genogram key are the two pages to keep open, and how to make a genogram walks the build step by step.

Related pages

Start with the genogram maker itself if you want a blank canvas, or the free genogram maker page for what is and is not free. Neighbouring disciplines use the same tool differently: genograms in therapy leans on the emotional layer, and genograms in nursing leans on the medical history. For the assessment pairing, see genogram vs ecomap; for the structural skeleton, 3-generation genogram; and if the family you are mapping crosses cultures, the cultural genogram adds the annotation layer for it.

Social work genogram FAQ

›What is a genogram in social work?

It is a diagram of a family across three or more generations, drawn with standard notation, used in assessment to record household composition, placement and custody history, bereavement, and the quality of the relationships between members. It is a working document rather than a one-off: it gets redrawn as placements and household membership change, and it travels with the case file.

›What should a social work genogram include?

At minimum three generations, every adult with a caring role whether or not they are a parent, dates of birth and death, and who currently lives in the household. Beyond structure, record the case-relevant facts: separation and divorce, kinship or foster placement with the date, adoption, incarceration or non-residence, and the relationships that are close, distant, conflicted or cut off. Anything you would have to explain in the narrative is worth putting on the diagram.

›What is the difference between a genogram and an ecomap in social work?

The genogram maps the family inward and backward across generations. The ecomap maps the household outward to the systems around it right now — school, health services, employment, faith community, agencies. Assessments commonly ask for both because neither answers the other's question.

›Do I need special software to make a genogram for a case file?

No. The builder on this page runs in a browser, uses the standard notation set, and exports a labelled PNG or PDF with an auto-generated legend so a colleague reading the file does not have to remember what a dotted drop line means. Nothing is uploaded — the diagram stays in your browser until you export it.

›Can I put client details in this tool?

Your work is held in your own browser's local storage and is never sent to a server, but that is a technical fact about this page, not a substitute for your employer's information governance rules. Follow local policy on identifiable data: most practitioners build with initials or first names only and keep the identifying detail in the case record.