There have been more and more type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) patients in all over the world. T2DM is widely considered as a multifactorial disease, and family history of diabetes, as one of the independent risk factors in its development, represents the combination of genetic susceptibility and shared environmental factors on the incidence. In this review, we elucidated the recent progress in genetic susceptibilities and shared environmental factors involved in the association between the family history of diabetes and risk of T2DM.