If you are reading this you probably have a few days, a list of things to arrange, and someone suggested a family tree.
This is a practical page. What works in a room, what doesn't, and how to set it up without adding a project to a week that already has too much in it.
Why a tree rather than only photographs
A photo display is the standard and it works. Most services have one, most people expect it, and nobody has ever regretted putting one up.
A family tree does something different. Photographs show a life — the person as they were, at various ages, among the people they knew. A tree shows that life in a line: who they came from, and who came after.
At a memorial that second thing has a specific effect. Many of the people on the chart are also people the room has lost, some recently and some long ago. Seeing them in one place, connected, positions the person who died among their family rather than alone at the end of something.
It also gives people something to do. A memorial has long stretches where thirty people are standing in a room with nothing scheduled, and a chart on a wall absorbs that in a way a slideshow on a loop does not, because people can approach it, point at it, and talk.
What actually works in a room
Put it up and leave it alone. No presentation, no gathering everyone around, no moment. Set it near the food or the guest book and let people find it on their own. They will.
Nobody should have to operate it. This is the most important practical point on this page. Anything requiring a person to stand up and drive a screen in front of a room is wrong for this event. Whoever would be doing that is family, and they should be in the room rather than working. Whatever you use, it should sit there by itself.
Keep it simple. Three or four generations back from the person who died, plus their descendants. That's a chart people can read standing up, in clothes they don't normally wear, in a room with bad lighting. More than that becomes a wall of text that nobody reads.
Have paper and a pen next to it. People will know things — a date, a place, a name in the outer edge. Some of them will be the last person alive who knows it. A pad beside the chart collects that, and in six months it will matter.
What to avoid
Anything with sound. Music is already handled by whoever is handling music.
Anything that needs the internet at a venue. Church halls, funeral homes, and function rooms have unreliable networks and nobody available to fix them. If it needs a connection to work, assume it won't.
Anything with the person's death date as its focal point. The chart is about a family. The date is on the order of service.
Anything unfinished. If your research has gaps — and it does, everyone's does — either fill them with "unknown" or trim the chart to the part that's solid. A memorial is not the place where someone notices their branch is missing.
Photographs of people who are still alive and might not want to be displayed. Worth thirty seconds of thought before you print anything.
The three-day version
If you have almost no time, here is the whole thing.
Print one chart. Whatever genealogy software or website the family already uses will export a chart as a PDF. Take it to a copy shop — most do same-day large format — and ask for matte, not gloss, because gloss reflects overhead lighting and makes it unreadable at an angle. An 18 × 24 inch print is enough to read standing up and cheap enough not to think about. Practical notes on doing this properly.
Put it on an easel or tape it to a wall near wherever people will be standing.
Put a pad beside it.
That's it. It takes one errand and it will be one of the things people remember about the afternoon.
If nobody in the family has a tree built, don't start one this week. Print a list of names and dates from whatever anyone has — a written-out four-generation sheet is fine, and considerably better than nothing.
If you have longer
For a service being planned weeks out, or for a gathering after the fact, a screen changes what's possible.
A printed chart is fixed at one person. A displayed one isn't — any person on it can become the middle, so a grandchild can find themselves on it, and so can the cousin who married in and has their own separate family behind them. That tends to draw more people into it than a single fixed chart does, because everyone can find their own position rather than looking at someone else's.
Practically: a television in the corner of the room, left on, showing the tree without anyone driving it. Not a presentation. Wallpaper that happens to be your family.
Bright Branches does this on Apple TV, Google TV, Android TV, Fire TV, and iPad, using a tree from FamilySearch, a GEDCOM file, or an Ancestry import. It has an idle mode that drifts across the chart on its own, which is the mode to use here — nobody has to hold a remote. There is a free tier for FamilySearch members. If the venue is unreliable or you are short on time, print the chart instead; it is the safer choice and it works.
Afterward
The chart usually outlasts the service, and that is most of its value.
It goes up in somebody's hallway, or gets photographed by six relatives before they leave, or ends up with whoever is now the oldest person in the family. Reunions and gatherings in the following years tend to have it around.
And the notes people wrote on that pad beside it are frequently the last new information the family ever collects about that generation. Whoever is keeping the research should get them within the week, while the paper still exists and the handwriting is still identifiable.
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