The guide

Genogram symbols

A genogram is not free drawing: it is a script. Every shape, every line and every mark has a fixed meaning, which is what lets a colleague read your diagram without you there to explain it. This page gathers the common symbols, the ones Monica McGoldrick and Randy Gerson stabilised from Genograms in Family Assessment (1985), and of which Genograms: Assessment and Treatment (4th edition, 2020, with Sueli Petry) is the current state.

The notation is not standardised by any authority: it is professional usage, very widely shared but with local variants. What follows is the reference notation, the one a trained reader will expect.

These are the essential symbols, not the whole chart. Not covered here: multiple successive unions — the most frequent case in clinical practice, and the one that demands the most room on the page —, sexual orientation, same-sex couples, assisted reproduction and donor configurations, and pets. They are in the reference work.

People

The shape says the sex. The cross through it says death. The double outline marks the person the genogram is built around, called the index person or identified patient.

Male
Female
Nonbinary
Sex unknown or not recorded
Index person
Death
Ongoing pregnancy
Miscarriage
Induced abortion
Stillbirth

Three points that come up often

The diamond is not a category, it is an absence: it reads « not recorded » or « unknown ». Use it for a forebear nobody knows anything about, not to classify someone.
The nonbinary dome — square base, circular top — is literally the two binary shapes merged.
Gender history is a separate field, never a shape of its own. The symbol draws the lived identity; when the history is clinically relevant, the sex assigned at birth is inscribed inside, markedly smaller. There is no « trans » symbol category.

Age, dates and clinical states

Age goes inside the shape. Birth and death years sit at the top corners. An uncertain date is qualified rather than invented: ~1930 for « around », bef. 1930 and aft. 1930 to bracket it.

Four states are marked on the shape itself, by a partial fill: substance abuse, physical illness, mental illness, and in recovery. The information is carried by the position of the tinted zone, not by its colour: it stays readable on a document printed in black and white.

A nuance of attribution. The reference chart codes « serious mental or physical problem » with a single fill, the bottom of the shape being reserved for substances. SpatioPsy Genogram separates physical illness and mental illness into two distinct zones. That is an extension, useful in practice but not part of the standard: worth knowing if your document goes to a colleague who will read the shape by the classic chart.

Unions

A union is drawn horizontally between two people, the man conventionally on the left. The form of the line says the nature of the bond, and a dated abbreviation makes it precise.

Bond	Line	Abbreviation
Marriage	Solid line	m followed by the year
Cohabitation	Dashed line	LT (living together)
Engagement	Dashed line	eng.
Separation	The union line, crossed by one slash	s followed by the year
Divorce	The union line, crossed by two slashes	d followed by the year

A consanguineous union is drawn as a double line: two close parallel lines, signalling that the partners are blood relatives.

Parent-child lines

Children descend from the union line by a vertical line, arranged left to right from oldest to youngest. That is a reading convention, not a detail: it lets a sibling rank be read at a glance.

Parent-child line	Drawing
Biological child	Solid vertical line down from the union
Adoption	Dashed vertical line
Foster care	Dashed vertical line
Fraternal twins	Two lines from a single point, in a Λ
Identical twins	The same Λ, closed by a horizontal bar

Relationship quality

This is the emotional layer, whose theoretical source is Murray Bowen (Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, 1978): fusion, distance, emotional cutoff, and transmission across generations. It overlays the structure without replacing it.

Quality	What it says
Close	An invested, warm relationship
Fused	Closeness that leaves little room for separateness
Distant	A thin relationship, few exchanges
Conflictual	Open, lasting tension
Fused and conflictual	Both at once, a frequent clinical combination
Close and conflictual	Strong investment, open conflict
Distant and conflictual	Distance and tension
Cutoff	Emotional cutoff: the bond is broken, not merely thinned
Repaired cutoff	A cutoff that has been mended, which is noted separately

A reading trap: on a union or parent-child line, the form of the line already carries a notation — a dashed union line means cohabitation, a dashed parent-child line means adoption. Layering an emotional quality on top would make both illegible. The emotional quality is therefore drawn as a separate link, above the union line, never on it.

Cutoffs and abuse

The emotional cutoff — Bowen's cut-off — is one of the heaviest notations in the genogram: it marks a broken bond, distinct from mere distance. It has its repair: a bond broken and then mended is noted differently from one that never was.

Abuse is noted directed, by an arrow running from the perpetrator to the victim: physical abuse, emotional abuse, sexual abuse, and neglect. Sexual abuse between blood relatives carries its own symbol.

The household

A dashed frame surrounds the people who live under the same roof. That is household information, not kinship: a grandmother taken in, a child in shared custody, a stepparent all enter it without the family structure changing.

What the notation does not provide for

This has to be said plainly, because it is the kind of gap that makes a document unreadable for whoever receives it. The reference notation places life events in the chronology, beside the diagram, and provides no symbol for placing them on the genogram itself.

SpatioPsy Genogram adds lettered badges (D bereavement, S health, M migration, J justice…). That is an addition, owned as such: they are explained in the printed legend, and hide with one gesture for a document that must keep to the standard.

The second departure is the one flagged above: physical and mental illness separated where the chart has a single fill. Those are the only two, and they are named here so that no reader takes an addition for a convention.

References

McGoldrick M., Gerson R., Petry S., Genograms: Assessment and Treatment, 4th edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ISBN 978-0-393-71404-3.
Bowen M., Family Therapy in Clinical Practice, Jason Aronson, 1978. ISBN 978-0-87668-334-7. Theoretical source of the emotional layer.