The guide

Genogram, génosociogramme, family tree

All three draw a family across several generations, and look alike from a distance. They do not look for the same thing, do not record the same information, and are not used in the same hands. The confusion is common, including between professionals.

	Family tree	Genogram	Génosociogramme
Purpose	Establish a line of descent	Understand a clinical situation	Explore transmission across generations
Depth	As far back as possible	Three generations as a rule	Variable, often more
What it carries	Descent, dates, places	Descent, households, dates, relationship quality	Descent and bonds, plus notable events and repetitions
Notation	Free, varies by software	Codified (McGoldrick)	Derived from the genogram, with its own additions
Who draws it	A private person, a genealogist	A clinician, with the person	A practitioner of the approach

The family tree

It answers a question of descent: who does one come from. It aims at completeness and depth, goes back as far as the archives allow, and records what can be verified — dates, places, occupations.

What it does not carry: the quality of relationships, the composition of households, and anything requiring judgement. A family tree does not say whether a father and his son were on speaking terms.

The genogram

This is a clinical tool. It aims at understanding a present situation, starting from the person consulting, and generally stops at three generations because that is the depth where patterns become legible without the page becoming illegible.

Its distinctive feature is adding a relational layer to the structure: close, distant, conflictual, fused, cut off. It also records households, that is who lives with whom, information a family tree ignores and which often weighs more than kinship.

Its notation is codified, stabilised by McGoldrick, Gerson and Petry. That is what lets a colleague read the diagram without a legend. It is detailed on the symbols page.

The génosociogramme

The term comes from Anne Ancelin Schützenberger, who developed it in France and set it out in Aïe, mes aïeux ! (1993). It has no currency in English, and is kept here in French for that reason: an English-speaking reader meets it mainly through The Ancestor Syndrome (1998), the translation of that book.

It starts from the genogram and looks at what is transmitted across generations: family loyalties, secrets, repetitions of dates or events. It is associated with a particular approach, psychogenealogy.

What to take away

Looking for where someone comes from: family tree.
Looking to understand a clinical situation and share it with a colleague: genogram.
Working on transmission across generations within psychogenealogy: génosociogramme.

SpatioPsy Genogram draws the notation of the second, and it serves as a basis for the third.

References

McGoldrick M., Gerson R., Petry S., Genograms: Assessment and Treatment, 4th edition, W. W. Norton & Company, 2020. ISBN 978-0-393-71404-3.
Ancelin Schützenberger A., Aïe, mes aïeux !, 1993; English translation The Ancestor Syndrome, Routledge, 1998.