Your Family Tree

Make YOUR FAMILY TREE

Your doctor or genetic counsellor will ask you and your parents about your family history. The genetic counsellor will also want to learn more about any illness in the family. This helps the doctors look after you in the best way possible. Let’s think of all the different names for people related to us:

• Brother, sister, twin, mother, father, grandmother, grandfather, uncle, aunt, cousin, niece, nephew.

The genetic counsellor draws a family “tree” to understand how everyone is related. The circles stand for girls and the squares stand for boys.

This is a sample tree created by one of our patients.

Exercise

Create your own family tree using our worksheet (20 KB pdf ) . You simply have to cut out the circles and squares and glue them on to a piece paper labelling your family members.