Why it matters to map your family, print it where everyone can see it, and write down the names before they’re gone.

From the founder

I grew up with my grandmother. My parents worked, so every afternoon after school, it was the two of us. And every afternoon, she told me about her childhood in the village.

She told her stories in such detail that I could almost see those days — the smell of her kitchen, the particular way she cooked, the people she grew up with.

She told me their names, but she also told me who they were.

What they believed in. What they valued. How they lived. The things they did without thinking because that was simply how they were.

I remember the stories.

I don’t remember all the names.

And that worries me.

Because I want my children to know more than who came before them. I want them to know the people behind the names — what they believed, what they stood for, how they lived, and what they passed on.

I want them to inherit not just our family tree, but a sense of where they came from.

The people. The stories. The values. The memories.

And that is where FrameMyRoots began.

Founder, FrameMyRoots

Why a tree

Why it matters to map your family, print it where everyone can see it, and write down the names before they’re gone.

There is a photograph in most families that nobody can name any more.

Everyone knows roughly who it is. Someone’s uncle. A cousin, perhaps, from the other side. The person who could have said for certain died a few years ago, and now the photograph just sits in the tin with the others.

A family tree helps you do that. It brings the names together. It connects generations. It keeps the stories from fading. So the next generation can know where they come from, and carry it forward with pride.

It isn’t only the big occasions worth keeping. It’s the ordinary days, the traditions nobody wrote down, and the values that made your family yours.

How fast it goes

Most people can name their parents and their grandparents without thinking.

Ask about your eight great-grandparents and it usually thins to two or three, often only on one side.

The generation before that — sixteen people, alive within the last hundred years — is almost always gone entirely. Not because nobody cared. Because nobody wrote it down while there was still someone to ask.

Two generations. That is the whole distance between a person and no record of them.

Who is the oldest person in your family you could still ask?

Not the oldest person you know. The oldest person you could reach this week.

Names first

The stories are the part you want. But names are what the stories hang on — who was whose sister, which uncle the village belonged to, who married into which family and when.

Names are also the least emotional part, and the first to go. Nobody sits down to memorise their great-aunts. You notice they have gone when you try to tell somebody the story and cannot say whose it was.

So write the names down first. Not because they are the point, but because everything else attaches to them.

Why a wall, and not a folder

A file gets opened when you remember it exists.

A framed tree in a hallway gets looked at by everyone who walks past — including the people who can correct it. Someone stops, points, and says that spelling is wrong, or she had a sister, you’ve missed her. Children ask who somebody is.

A tree on a wall is the only version that keeps getting better, because it is the only one other people can see.

That someone can be you

One day, someone in your family will want to know where they came from — and whether they can find out depends entirely on whether someone, now, took the time to remember.

You don’t need dates. You don’t need to be sure. You don’t need to finish. Write down three names you are certain of, and one person you could ask about the rest.

That is genuinely enough to begin, and it is more than most families ever have.

Start your family tree — free

Free to build. Yours to keep.