Our Guides and Forms

We have developed several guides and forms to help you organize your family history and get started preserving your family heritage - with all those precious stories, images and milestones you'll want to share and pass along to each new generation.

We hope you find these forms useful. Feel free to share them with your family and friends. We would love to hear from you - send your comments and let us know if you find our forms helpful and let us know how we can improve them.

If you already have your family tree data collected, you won't need to fill in these forms. We can import your genealogy (gedcom) data file. Contact us for more information.

> View the Guide to Our Process (6MB PDF)
This guide explains our process and how Our Living Tree can help you organize your family roots. It has forms you can use to start gathering your family history. There are sections for Frequently Asked Questions and answers, getting started with photos, and illustrations that show how it all comes together on your Family Interactive CD.

> View the CD Preview Guide (6MB PDF)
This guide gives you a tour of all the features included in the Family Interactive CD. It's a printed version of all the screens, along with a brief description and illustration of how all the features interact. You can view these same sample pages in the Product Features section of this web site.

>Step 1: The Family Historian
>Step 2: Organize the Information
>Step 3: Gather Photos
>Step 4: Rough Cut Review
>Step 5: Custom CD's
> Our Guides and Forms

> View Family Forms (6MB PDF)
These two sets of forms will help you organize your family tree and make the process as easy as possible. The first form is called 'Meet Our Family'. You can print these forms and fill out one for each family, listing their children on the back. When we provide this form to our customers, we print the second page for children on the flip side of the form.

The second form, 'Moments in Our Family', was developed to jog your memory and as a thought-starter, asking leading questions about important times in your life, your thoughts on various topics, stories you would like told, and messages you would like to leave behind. We hope that you encourage every one in your family to fill out their own 'Moments in Our Family' form. These forms are also included in our Guide to Our Process. When we provide this 2 page form to our customers, we print the second page on the flip side of the form.

> View Family Forms with Instructions and Samples (6MB PDF)
This set has the Family Forms plus some tips on filling them out, along with sample forms filled in for easy reference.

> View the Family Ancestor Chart (6MB PDF)
This chart will help you get an overview of your family tree. It will give you a good idea of how many families and how many people make up your family roots.

This chart uses the same numbering scheme as standard genealogy charts, called Pedigree Charts. Start with #1 representing you and #2 and #3 representing your parents, and keep going all the way out through five generations. Standard genealogy charts list the parents only while this chart lets you list the children as well.

Filling in this chart is a very good first step towards gathering your family history. It may make you feel better prepared to start entering your family history data or filling in the 'Meet Our Family' forms with all the details for each family and each person. This chart is best when printed on large paper - tabloid size (11x17), although you can print it on legal or letter size paper as well.

To view, you need the Acrobat Reader. To get the Adobe Acrobat Reader, click here.