Building Your Official Family Census
Ideas to Organize and Maintain Your Family Member Records
As we discuss in The Uncommon Genealogist Get Started Guide, a cornerstone of comprehensive genealogy work is understanding who’s in your family.
Even though we frequently preach that genealogy shouldn’t be solely about names, dates, and places, we recognize that this is often a good starting point for someone just beginning their genealogy journey. It provides context on the time periods, locations, and cultures your family lived in and opens the door to creative thinking about how to best tell your family’s incredible, inspiring story.
“But, Danny, putting together a family census sounds like a lot of work,” you may say. That’s true! It’s a ton of work to assemble a proper and accurate family census. However, it’s work that can be done over not days or weeks, but months and years.
“ Building your official family census is less a one-and-done exercise and more a continuous process. Thankfully, there are ways to make that process less painful by organizing and maintaining your records in a clear way.”
This post explores those techniques for making this critical process of building your family member database easier. Many of these tactics are from trial and error in my own experiences and observing great practices by others. The result is a system that can work for anyone, with any amount of time to dedicate to their genealogy work.
Article Quick Navigation:
Family Member Census Cards: Use our free printable template or invest in printed and pre-cut index cards to document family details.
The F.M.I.N. Method: Learn how to apply our unique and simplified tracking methodology to map relationships between members of your family tree.
Family Census Tracker Template: Consolidate your data in our free Excel-based tracker template and maintain a robust family database.
Online Services vs Old-Fashioned Methods
It’s one of the most frequent questions I receive: “Are online services and tools like Ancestry.com worth it?” I will reserve my full perspectives on this topic for a future post but can offer a couple relevant thoughts now.
Ancestry.com and other tools like it are great for supporting your research effort. They help you quickly and easily dig into thousands of databases and efficiently locate information. It still requires work to match records and cross-check with other sources. Some people will use what they find in these databases at face value, which only creates a mess later when records and information don’t match.
Sites like Ancestry.com also often have easy-to-use family tree building capabilities. The interface is slick, it can keep records tied to individual members of the tree, and this capability is often (or still, as of this writing) free on many genealogy sites. Accessing these sites’ extensive databases is still a paid activity, however, making it an expensive endeavor if you don’t plan and structure your research properly.
If you’re more old-fashioned like me, you may be more inclined to establish your own system of record keeping. I started using online services several years ago, but quickly switched when I realized that having a printed record is also important to me. I also created an Excel-based master list of all the members in my family tree, making it easy for me to search, filter, and organized the family in a list format.
Ultimately, I advocate for a hybrid old-fashioned and online approach. You get the best of both worlds, create some fail safes and maximize the value of this activity.
Step 1: The Family Member Census Cards
Start with the more old-fashioned approach by either using our printable Family Member Census Card Template or investing in our Family Member Census Cards (pictured below). The latter is designed and printed on a 4-inch by 6-inch sheet of sturdy cardstock like a postcard. They fit cleanly in an index card organizer, which allows you to easily arrange cards based on name or other categorical information.
I particularly enjoy being able to physically flip through my family member cards during research or writing. I use this organizer made by Offilicious Office Supply for my records. They don’t require a lot of space and are hugely efficient. Highly recommend!
Whether you leverage the printable template or invest in the Family Member Census Cards, the information included is the same. They are fairly self-explanatory and include several key data points:
First name, middle name, maiden name, and last name
Date of birth and location
Date of death and location
Name of both parents
Additional notes and information as collected
There is also space to print and add a small headshot of the family member. The cards are specifically designed to be easy so you can spend more time researching and building your output!
You’ll notice a term called “F.M.I.N.” on the card—both at the top-left of the front side and along the names of the father and mother on the back side. We will talk more about the F.M.I.N. concept next. This method alone will save you painstaking hours!
Step 2: The F.M.I.N. Method of Organization
There are countless ideas and options out there for organizing your family members. While some professionals and academics sanction only a couple of these methods as “approved,” I don’t believe those traditional rules need apply on our uncommon genealogy journeys!
I developed the F.M.I.N. Method a few years ago when building (actually, struggling to build) my own family census.
After researching other approaches, I merged a few of them to develop the Family Member Identification Number (F.M.I.N.) concept that serves me incredibly well. Every family member in your tree receives an F.M.I.N., including spouses. F.M.I.N.s are comprised of two parts, separated by a hyphen. Let’s dig into the details.
Part 1: Generation and Family Assignment
Every member of your family is part of a generation. When mapping the family tree, performing research, and writing your story, it is hugely beneficial to quickly know approximately where someone is in the long timeline of your family’s history. This cohort is their generation.
The first number in the F.M.I.N. is the generational indicator—a 1, 2, 3, and so on.
To keep it easier on yourself, especially if you’re unsure how far back you will find ancestors, use yourself as the first generation (Gen 1) and work your way backwards. This means your father would be Gen 2, your grandmother Gen 3, etc.
If your family immigrated, you may also align the generational indicator with the first generation in the new country. For example, if your second-great-grandfather was the first ancestor to be born in the United States, then he would be Gen 1, his father is Gen -1, his grandfather Gen -2, and so on.
You can adjust these rules as needed to fit what works for you—they shouldn’t be set in stone.
The second piece of this first part is a family indicator. This is especially helpful if you are mapping a family tree from a specific person in your lineage (which we highly recommend).
For example, if you decided that you will document the descendants of your fourth-great-grandparents who were born in the 1790s, then assign each of their children a letter: A, B, C, etc.
As you map the family tree, every descendant would include a letter, allowing you to quickly identify which of the children in the lineage they belong.
You don’t have to use the family indicator if it doesn’t work for you. Do what makes sense.
Depending on your decision of how to develop this first part, you now have the start of an F.M.I.N.—something like “2A-“ or “-1B-” or a variation of that.
Part 2: Placement in the Lineage
Starting now after the hyphen are a series of numbers that reflect the placement of that family member in their immediate family, their parent’s family, and all the way back to the base.
The numbers that appear here are sequential according to order of birth. For example, if my grandfather was the fourth child born to his parents, he would have a “4” after the hyphen. Following the lineage if his mother was the second child born to her parents, then my grandfather’s number would be 24.
This process goes on and on all the way back to the specific person in your lineage who is at the very top of your research tree (another reason why it’s so important to set the scope).
If we consider my second-great-grandparents as the tree baseline, then my F.M.I.N. is 6F-6361. I am part of the sixth generation removed from immigration, belong to “Family F” in the lineage, my great-grandfather was the sixth child, my grandfather was the third, my father was the sixth, and I am the first born.
With this structure of the F.M.I.N. it becomes easy to quickly review a family member and trace them back to the start and understand other F.M.I.N.s in the family tree.
Denoting Spouses or Divorced Parents
We keep the F.M.I.N. simple for spouses. Because they are not blood relatives, we want to be sure they are separated from the normal F.M.I.N. structure.
For a first spouse, simply add an “s1” to the end of their spouse’s (the blood relative’s) F.M.I.N.
As an example, my mother’s F.M.I.N. is 5F-636s1. If my father had prior spouses, especially any that he has children, you can denote the different spouses using “s1” or “s2” and so forth.
Sometimes tracking with other methods feels like a circular exercise. The F.M.I.N. Method removes that complexity and enables ease of documentation, sorting, and maintenance over time. Once you complete your Family Member Census Cards, what’s next? Compiling your full census, of course!
Step 3: The Family Census Tracker
A main part of establishing this website and The Uncommon Genealogist was to provide helpful resources to others who want to pursue their genealogy journeys.
When I first started out, I was frustrated by how few actual, helpful resources existed for performing effective and non-academic family history work. Sites like Ancestry.com are helpful, but they didn’t give me what I needed. The good news is that we developed a Family Census Tracker to act as your consolidated log for family member detail.
You can download the Family Census Tracker for free (as it should be) and use in Microsoft Excel. It’s a great way to build a “back-up” to your index card records and also quickly sort, map, and filter your data.
Once you download the sheet, you will see only two tabs:
Tab 1 is the master census record. This consists of all the exhaustive data. The columns here cover the basics that exist on your Family Member Census Card and a few other helpful pieces of information. Update this as you go along and soon you will hundreds of family members in your census!
Tab 2 is a dashboard that summarizes using charts some interesting insights from your data. If you are familiar with using charts in Microsoft Excel, feel free to make your own.
Save your Family Census Tracker is a safe place and keep it handy! It’s a fantastic quick reference tool as you conduct research, build your tree, and document your story.
Bonus: Using Ancestry.com or a Similar Service
After I performed completed all the Family Member Census Cards, assigned all the F.M.I.N.s, and filled out the Family Census Tracker, I added a bonus step and added my family member information to Ancestry.com.
I did this for two reasons: (1) this is a great way to “back-up” the records and see the family tree in a visual format with very minimal work and (2) this allows others on Ancestry.com to find your tree and offer feedback if you choose to make it public. I’ve only ever received a couple of messages from others viewing my tree, but the chance is always out there if you spend the extra couple hours to put it up.
The other benefit to adding your tree to a service like Anextry.com is that you can attach things like census records, martial records, and more to individual family members. Of course, viewing those items is also a paid feature, but the capability is there, nonetheless.
Getting Started
Building your Official Family Census is a fantastic place to start on your genealogy journey. It provides you a great, tangible quick win and drives organization of the information you collect.
I’ve seen others use notebooks, journals, and sticky notes to scribble and scratch family member names, draw half-accurate family trees, and attempt to document names, dates, and places. This is a recipe for disappointment and a lot of frustration—keeping yourself organized is half the battle. Our tips and resources will help.
Your next steps for getting started:
Reference The Uncommon Genealogist Get Started Guide.
Download the printable version of the Family Member Census Cards or invest in a pre-cut pack.
Invest in a Family Member Census Card organizer, like this one available on Amazon.
Decide your rules for leveraging the F.M.I.N. structure.
Download the Family Census Tracker and use in Microsoft Excel.