Building your tree

Once you've opened a tree, you'll spend most of your time adding people and connecting them. Here's the model.

Adding the first person

A new tree is empty, so the canvas shows a Start your family tree prompt. The main button, Create starter tree, seeds a small starter family — a child with both parents — so the canvas has a real shape to build on, and drops you into renaming the child. Prefer to begin from a single person? Add one person instead adds one placeholder and opens their details in the side panel.

To fill in details, click any field in the side panel and edit it in place:

Name is the only required field. Type it the way it is written: Draw My Tree reads the last word as the surname and keeps a leading particle with it, so "Vincent van Gogh" is shown, abbreviated, and exported under van Gogh rather than "Gogh". The particles it knows are the common European ones (van, von, de, del, della, di, da, du, la, le, der, den, ter, ten, dos, af, av, bin, ibn and friends), matched whatever their capitalization. The one place that still groups on the last word alone is the toolbar's family filter — see below.
Birth date and death date accept full dates (1888-04-12) or just a year (1888). Partial dates are fine; type what you have.
Gender controls a few visual cues (card accent color by default, GEDCOM export).
Tags are free-form labels. Use them however you like: "Veteran", "Immigrant", "Maternal line".

Each field saves as you go; press Enter or click away to commit it. You can always come back and fill in more later. Everyone after the first person is added by linking them to someone already in the tree; see below.

Linking people

Family trees are nothing without relationships. Draw My Tree models two kinds:

Parent–child, the directional link between a parent and their child.
Partner, a non-directional link between two people who are or were a couple.

On the canvas, hovering or selecting a person reveals a small + tucked into the bottom-right corner of their card. It sits on the card itself, painted in the card's own colours, so it always reads as belonging to that person and not to the neighbour beside them — and it grows with the card as the card lifts under your pointer. Click it and pick Add a parent, Add a spouse, or Add a child; the new person is created, linked, and selected, ready to rename. Right-clicking a card offers the same three actions alongside the rest of its menu.

A couple of things about the + worth knowing:

A selected card keeps its + even as you move the pointer elsewhere, so you can reach for the button without losing it.
Zoomed far enough out that cards are down to initials, the + steps aside; zoom back in and it returns.
Keyboard: Tab into the tree, move between people with the arrow keys, and Tab once more from a selected person to reach their +.

To add a relationship to someone already in the tree, open a person and find the Family section. It has three fields: Parents, Spouses (partners), and Children. Use a field's dropdown to link someone already in the tree, or click Create new parent / spouse / child to add a brand-new person in a quick dialog (name, birth and death dates, gender). Changes apply immediately.

Parent–child types

When you add a parent or child, you can label the link:

Biological: the default.
Adoptive: for legal adoption.
Foster: a foster parent.
Step: a parent through remarriage.
Guardian: a non-parent caretaker.

These show up subtly in the visual style of the edge and survive a GEDCOM round-trip.

Confidence

If you're not sure about a link (maybe an unsourced family rumor) you can mark it as probable or possible instead of certain. The default is certain, and the setting is recorded with the relationship so you (or an assistant reading the tree) can tell a confirmed link from a tentative one.

Partner status

For partners, the status options are married, engaged, partnered, separated, and divorced. You can also set a start year and end year if you have them.

Multi-parent families

A child can have any number of parents: biological mother and father, plus adoptive parents, plus a stepparent, all on the same person. Draw My Tree handles this by drawing all the parent links and grouping the parents who share children into a small "family node" between generations.

If a person ends up with too many parent links to be readable, consider:

Splitting the tree by branch (use the Family filter in the toolbar to focus one side at a time).

Editing and deleting

Click any person to bring up their details, then click any field to edit it in place; changes save as you go. (The Story editor is the exception; it has an explicit Save and warns you about unsaved changes before you close the panel.)

To delete a person, scroll to the bottom of the details panel and use the destructive action.

Finding someone in a big tree

Two ways:

Toolbar search: start typing a name; matching people show up in a dropdown. Click one to select and center it.
Family filter: once you've imported or built out multiple family names, the toolbar's family dropdown lets you focus on one side at a time. It groups on the last word of each name, so a particle surname is listed under its final word ("Gogh", not "van Gogh") even though the cards themselves show the whole surname. That keeps every saved filter view pointing at the family it was saved under.