FamilySearch offers multiple views for organizing and presenting your genealogy: landscape, portrait, fan chart, descendancy, and first ancestor. Depending on your goals and interests, each view can provide you with a unique pathway for exploring your family tree.

What Is Portrait View?

The portrait view family tree chart (or pedigree chart) is organized vertically. Your profile is in the middle of the chart, with your ancestors above you and your descendants below. To access it, log in to your FamilySearch account and navigate to the Family Tree. Then, make sure you have Portrait selected in the top right corner. For help, read the FamilySearch Help article.

Features of Portrait View

To make the pedigree chart more effective and convenient, try these features:

View siblings. In addition to seeing direct-line ancestors, you can view your family’s collateral lines, which includes your ancestors’ siblings and their descendants. Do this by clicking the arrows on the side of an individual’s card.

View a single family line. When you previously wanted to view a relative’s line, the couple’s line would be expanded to show both spouses’ parents and grandparents. Now, you see only the family line extended through the specific ancestor you’re interested in viewing, saving more screen space and keeping your research focused.

View multiple family lines at the same time. In the past, whatever family line you had displayed would automatically close if you clicked a different family line. Not anymore. Each family line that you open stays on screen until you decide to close it.

Add relatives quickly without leaving the page. You can now add a relative’s child, spouse, or sibling directly from the individual’s card by clicking the + icon. (You can only add a spouse with the + icon if there is no spouse already added. If there is an existing spouse, additional spouses will need to be added through the individual’s profile page.)

Distinguish living individuals more easily. Visual clues tell you which people in your tree are living and which have passed away. (For living individuals, this only applies to the relatives and family members that you alone have added to Family Tree. Any information about a living person that someone else adds is private and wouldn’t be visible to you — unless you’re working together in a family group tree.)

This article was adapted from the article “Updates to Portrait View in Family Tree.”