Do I need to do both?

Do I need to do both?

In many ways, doing family history will create your family tree. So it isn't really a case of doing one or the other. You can try and do family history without a family tree, but without knowing who these people are, a) you've got no certainty that they're the right guys in your family tree, b) you're not quite sure where they appear in your family tree and what relevance the research that you're going to undertake is going to have, and c) the social context won't really work. So family history and family trees do go hand in hand, and without one, the other is rather meaningless.