How to Chart a Blended Family Tree: Remarriages and Half-Siblings

A tidy family tree assumes two parents, married once, with a single row of children. Many families are not like that. There are remarriages after a death or a divorce, men with more than one wife, step-parents, half-siblings, and households that bring two families together. Here is how to chart a blended family tree that reflects what actually happened.

Why blended families are hard to chart

A chart that assumes one partner per person has nowhere to put a second marriage. Squeeze it in anyway and something gets lost: one of the marriages is hidden, or half-siblings are scattered so it is unclear who belongs to whom.

A good blended family chart needs to show three things clearly:

• Multiple marriages for the same person
• Which children belong to which marriage — full siblings versus half-siblings
• Step-relationships without pretending they are biological

The building blocks

Multiple spouses. Draw each marriage as its own union linked to the same person. If your grandfather married twice, both wives appear, each connected to him, each with their own children beneath them.

Half-siblings. Half-siblings share one parent, not two. On the chart, they connect up to the shared parent but branch from different unions. Keeping the unions distinct is what makes the half-relationship readable at a glance.

Step-parents and step-children. A step-parent is connected through marriage, not birth. The cleanest way to show this is to record the marriage (which creates the step-relationship) without drawing a parent-child line to children who are not biologically theirs. The relationship is implied correctly by the structure.

How Blaadline records it

Blaadline records these relationships explicitly, so the chart never has to guess:

• A person can have more than one spouse, each recorded as a separate marriage — including a man with several wives, which many family histories need.
• Adding a child asks which marriage the child belongs to, so full and half-siblings stay distinct. If the other parent is not known, you can record exactly that instead of guessing.
• There is no separate step-parent relationship. A step-parent is recorded through the marriage alone, so nobody is ever drawn as the parent of a child who is not theirs.
• Someone who is already in the tree can be linked into a new marriage instead of being entered twice.

Blaadline draws one lineage at a time — the selected person's father's line and the selected person's descendants — and clicking anyone redraws the tree from their point of view. Select a parent who married more than once and each marriage is drawn with its own children.

A practical order of operations

1. Add the person with multiple marriages first.
2. Add each spouse and connect them as separate unions.
3. Add the children under the correct union — this is what keeps full and half-siblings distinct.
4. For step-relationships, record the marriage but do not draw a biological parent line where none exists.
5. Review the layout and confirm each child sits under the right pairing.

Then share it

Once your blended tree is accurate, you can export it as a print-ready PDF. For what "half-", "step-" and "in-law" mean across generations, see the cousin chart. For the bigger picture on gathering and verifying all of this, start with how to make a family tree, or open the builder and start adding people now.