Medical Genogram

What a medical genogram records

Family history taken as prose has a known failure mode: it is written once, at registration, and never read again. The same history drawn as a diagram survives, because the next clinician can see the shape of it in a few seconds. What makes it medical rather than genealogical is the annotation layer.

• A condition and an age, not just a condition. Age at diagnosis is the single most useful number on the page. A myocardial infarction at 49 and one at 88 are different findings, and only one of them changes what you do about the patient in front of you.
• Cause and age at death for the deceased. The X through a symbol says someone died; the note says whether it is relevant. In the example above, the grandfather's sudden cardiac death at 45 is the reason the whole paternal line is worth asking about.
• Which side of the family. A genogram encodes this structurally, which is why a list of conditions cannot replace it. Three cancers mean one thing spread across both parents' families and another thing stacked on one.
• Half and step relationships. A half-sibling shares one parent's line and none of the other's. Recorded as a second union rather than as another child, the diagram works that out for you.
• Who is alive to ask. A history is only as good as its source. Living relatives on the diagram are the people whose records can still be confirmed.

Why three generations

The three-generation convention is not arbitrary. One generation tells you nothing about inheritance. Two tells you a parent had something. Three lets you see whether it skipped, whether it arrived earlier each time, and whether it sits on one side. The sample above has 11 people across 3 generations joined by 10 connections, which is roughly the size a real history reaches before it stops fitting on one page.

Go sideways before you go further back. Aunts, uncles and cousins on the affected side carry more information than great-grandparents whose cause of death is family legend. If you do need a fourth row, the three-generation genogram page covers how the rows are numbered and where a fourth one starts to break the layout.

The patterns it is drawn to surface

Nobody draws a medical genogram for its own sake. It exists to make a handful of family patterns hard to miss, the ones that shift a patient from average risk to a referral:

• Early age at onset — disease appearing decades before it usually would.
• The same condition in several close relatives on the same side of the family.
• A condition appearing earlier in each successive generation.
• Sudden or unexplained death in a young relative, which is why cause of death belongs on the diagram and not in a footnote.
• Disease in the sex it rarely affects, or affecting paired organs on both sides.

A genogram makes the pattern visible; it does not quantify it. Once the diagram raises a flag, the next step is a validated risk tool or a genetics referral, not a harder squint at the drawing.

Genogram, pedigree, or family tree

These three get used interchangeably and they are not the same document. A family tree records descent and nothing clinical. A pedigree is the genetics instrument: shaded symbols for affected individuals, numbered generations, read for a mode of inheritance, and stripped of anything social. A medical genogram sits between them — full structure, full health annotation, and room for the household and relationship detail that explains why a patient does or does not know their father's history. The boundary with ordinary genealogy is drawn on genogram vs family tree, and genogram vs ecomap covers the companion diagram for a patient's support systems.

Neighbouring disciplines draw the same diagram with a different emphasis. Genograms in nursing frame it as the family assessment taught in BSN and NP programmes, with the assignment workflow that goes with it. Genograms in therapy add the emotional layer that this page leaves off on purpose. Genograms in social work foreground household composition and placement history.

Drawing one from a patient interview

1. Load the medical template above, or start from the blank genogram template if you would rather build the skeleton as you go.
2. Place the patient first and mark them as the index person — the double outline is what tells the next reader whose history this is.
3. Work outward: siblings, then parents, then each parent's siblings, then grandparents. Asking in that order keeps the interview in the order people remember.
4. Put the condition and the age in the notes field on each person. It renders under the name and exports with the diagram.
5. Auto-arrange, then export. The PDF gets a title block and a legend built from the symbols you actually used, so it can stand alone in a chart.

Unfamiliar notation is catalogued with a picture on genogram symbols and condensed to one printable sheet on the genogram key. The step-by-step build is on how to make a genogram, and worked examples show finished diagrams read aloud.

Records, names, and where the file lives

A medical genogram with real names on it is clinical material from the first symbol. This editor holds the diagram in your browser's local storage and posts nothing to a server, which is a statement about this tool rather than a compliance opinion about your setting. Follow your own information-governance rules; where they are strict, build with initials and add identifiers only on the copy that goes into the record. Because there is no account, the exported PNG or PDF is the artefact — clearing site data deletes the working copy.

The full editor with undo and autosave is the genogram maker home page. It is free to use, runs entirely in the browser with nothing to install on a hospital or clinic machine, and ships 13 ready-made templates.

Medical genogram FAQ