How to add a relative whose name you don’t know to your family tree
Every family has someone nobody can name: a great-grandmother who is only ever “Dadi”, an uncle in a photograph no one can place. Most tree software wants a name before it will keep the person. Here is how to record them honestly instead.
Don’t invent a name
A made-up name looks exactly like a real one. Once it is in the tree it is copied into a relative’s file, printed in a family book and quoted at the next wedding as fact. A blank is honest: it says the family knows this person existed and does not yet know more.
Write down what the family does know
The name is the least useful thing to have, and the first thing to go missing. These matter more:
- How they connect. Whose parent, partner, child or sibling they were. This is the most valuable fact, because it fixes their place in the family.
- Which side of the family. Your father’s side and your mother’s side are named differently in many languages, Hindi among them, so it matters later. See the Hindi relation chart.
- Roughly when. A decade, “born before 1920”, “died young”. Anything that places them in time.
- What people remember. A trade, a village, a story. f-tree has a notes field for the family’s own words.
- Who told you. Two relatives often remember the same person differently, so write down whose memory it is.
Record dates you only half know
f-tree accepts a year on its own (1938), a year and month (1942-08) or a full date. It never makes you choose a day you don’t know, and there is no separate “approximate” flag, because writing only the year is the statement. A birthday remembered without a year can be stored as just a day and month, so the birthday reminder still works.
Put them in the tree where they belong
Add the person, leave the name empty, and connect them to the people they link to. f-tree draws them as a dashed brass card marked Unknown, so you can see at a glance where the record has holes.
Because the unknown person is an ordinary person in the tree, everything keeps working around them. The chart, the compact view and the relationship finder all treat them like anyone else, and in the finder’s line they appear as “Unknown”.
Name them later without breaking anything
When someone finally remembers, type the name into the same person. Nothing else moves: every relationship that pointed at the blank card now points at the named one.
Questions that get relatives talking
- Who did they marry, and where did they live?
- What did people call them? Family nicknames and kinship words (“Badi Dadi”, “Chhote Mama”) are clues.
- Is there a photograph, a letter or a document with their name on it?
- Who was at the wedding or the funeral?
- Who else remembers them, and would they talk to me?
When two blank cards might be one person
Keep them separate until you have evidence. Combining two real people into one is much harder to undo than leaving a duplicate, which you can always merge later. The same reasoning is why f-tree never matches an unnamed person automatically when you import a relative’s file.
Cousins and removals are easy to get wrong by hand too. The relationship finder explains what “first cousin once removed” means, and the Wikipedia article on cousins is a good neutral reference.
Record the people nobody can name
Free, works offline, and there is no limit on how many people you can add.