Has anyone in your family created a family tree?

Yes.  I think we all contribute to the making of a family tree.  We all have our own little branches and leaves that are spawn from the roots and trunk. 
We all are taking part in creating our trees.

  Technically, the family tree already exists, and therefore cannot be “created”. The verb you’re looking for is “traced“ or “tracked” or “recorded”.

  When Alex Haley wrote the book “Roots”, my mother read it* and became fascinated with the idea of tracing our own family’s history. I don’t know how far back she uncovered information.

1. My family tree has loads of nuts in it.  

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     Walnut

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     Almond

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     Pecan

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     Brazil nut

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     Cashew

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   Almond

   Nut

   The almond // is a species of tree native to Iran and surrounding countries as well as Central Asia, but widely cultivated elsewhere. The almond is also the name of the edible and widely cultivated seed of this tree. Within the genus Prunus, it is classified with the …

I have my Maternal Grandmothers side back to the 1650s. Both my Paternal Grandma and Grandpa's sides to the 1800s. My husbands Father's 1600s. I could not get very far with Hubbys Mothers side. 

Let me see on my side, Paternal I can trace back to 968, Maternal is a bit shortened 1st record is from a Dustup in the UK at a place called Hasting in 1066.  Appears a forebear lopped a few Saxon heads off and got some land for it.

On my partners side late 900's in Austria, Hungary, and other Hapsburg Lands.  We probably had a few forebears sleeping with each somewhere in the distant past.

Vatican records and family Bibles back this up.  There are those we can not ascertain their pedigree since they married in

My cousin's wife has traced us back a few generations, but not many. We've never really been a family for keeping records, not even photograph albums. 

It doesn't seem easy to do this, without a lot of meticulous work even just finding the official records. A lot appear to have been sold or given to on-line tracing firms who lure you in with a free half-hour session then charge you a lot of money for you to trawl through the records.   

My personal experience: Mother's tree grows and grows (11507 individuals and no end in sight). With 2 parents, 4 grandparents, 8 great grandparents, and so on, going back just twenty generations (in my case) back brings a theoretical over a million direct ancestors - except their will inevitable be 'overlaps'. We show 29 or 30 generations dating from the Norman conquest - and in theory, at that time more direct ancestors of mine than the population of the whole country. In genealogical research, sooner or later a family of commoners will have the scion of a noble, or notable, family, marrying into their ancestral line, and so that branch is likely to be well documented back into the mists of time - and noble families intermarry like nobody's business, so the tree suddenly has access to more linked family relationships than it can handle. But going back and back on through the generation, there  comes a point when the number of theoretical direct ancestors exceeds the population of Earth (at the time). The tree is impossible to draw in its entirety - for one thing it has too many crossings and re-crossings in marriages between distant relatives, who could have had no inkling of their faint family relationship at the time. The flies in the ointment are cases, and who knows how many and how often, where the purported father is in fact not the actual father. 
        This post was edited by rattbagge at December 8, 2020 11:55 AM MST

My cousin's wife has tried it but I don't how far back she managed to trace us. She did though find some interesting material about a cycle-manufacturing company established by my Great-Grandfather.

That backwards-calculation conundrum - apparently showing a far greater past population - is quite an old one. It's clearly not true but it does look intuitive, and causes a lot of head-scratching. It fails because the grand- and great-grand - ancestor couples have each produced anything from 0 to several children who then form widening families while the grand- generation is dying, so the population is not inverted.

Family-trees are often drawn botanically upside down, "trunk" (first recorded, fruitful marriage) at the top, but they show the line usually expands with time, not shrinks, even though drawn down-page.


Some people have tried geographical tracing by DNA, and there are companies who purport to be able to do that for you, but they rely on very wide generalising and assumptions. Fun perhaps, but otherwise a waste of money as it has little or real scientific meaning for modern people. I think it is used more credibly for analysing remains of archaeological age; from societies that did not usually stray far from home region, but even then is only an estimate.

Its first and most obvious flaw is that genetic inheritance works by powers of 2, because for each of us half of our genetic code is from each parent; half of each of theirs from their own parents, and so on.

Go back 4 generations and the inherited strands in us are only [1/(2^4)] = 1/16, of each of those parents; and for most people, that is within only a century or so.  

The DNA "method" also cannot account for the sheer complexity Rattbagge describes of crossing-lines (also of migrations). However, the sentence about the inter-marrying of noble families ought really be in the past tense as it is much less common now. Even many of the world's remaining royal families nowadays often marry outside their like families. Like-for-like kinship in our times between wealthy people is much more commonly by the riches coming from business or highly-paid "celebrity" status, not aristocracy.
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So church, local-authority and other official records, short of a long-established family diligently keeping its own family-tree generation after generation, are still the most reliable for tracing your ancestry.

I did one, but the family didn't seem interested. I may still do another one and don't really care about their thoughts anymore.

Yep ... my dad was really into it, since nobody had traced the family back.
He found a removed cousin who had been in an asylum since childhood.  From when they put kids in asylums for being "too disruptive".  My dad found the nearest living relatives, and they went and got the guy out and he was able to live out his final years with relatives.  
He also found we are distant relatives of Walt Disney.  But since we don't get any benefits, it's just a trivia topic.

My mom's family passes down oral history ... which she was able to confirm using Ancestry.com.

I can't remember which side, but one of my ancestors was relatively wealthy - but gave most of their land up to develop a city where the railroad was going through.  We went back one year and saw their "plains manor" and was taking pictures of it, when the occupants came out to ask what we were doing.  (This was late 1970s)  We discovered they were also descendants of the couple - and the home had stayed in the family for generations.

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Another of my relatives was John Milburn Davis.  The creator of the Davis Memorial is Hiawatha Kansas.
That's an interesting story.

https://www.cityofhiawatha.org/visitors/what-to-see-do/davis-memorial#:~:text=John%20Milburn%20Davis%20erected%20this,in%20their%20detail%20and%20accuracy.

From our family history, the reason he spent all that money on her memorial, is because her family demanded any money he didn't spend on her funeral be "returned" to them.  (They had given it as a wedding gift, but never liked John as he came from a poor family and she came from a wealthy one.)

Both grandfathers did so late in life. One was able to trace one branch from Australia, to Quebec, to France and the family actually came from Spain (Basques who fled the Inquisition, and bought themselves a title on arrival in Versailles).
Most of my family, both sides, were from Ireland - even the three who weren't ended up marrying Irish immigrants (or Australians of Irish descent).
Two branches dead-end - Australian aborigines didn't keep written records, and one ancestor was a man with no past - he called himself "John Smith" ('nuff said, right?)
One relative, not a direct ancestor but my great-great-grandfather's brother, was a "bushranger" (Australian highwayman), known by the sobriquet of "Black Jack Monaghan".