A family tree, also called a genealogy or a pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. More detailed family trees, used in medicine and social work, are known as genograms.
A family tree, also called a genealogy or a pedigree chart, is a chart representing family relationships in a conventional tree structure. More detailed family trees, used in medicine and social work, are known as genograms.
Genealogical data can be represented in several formats, for example, as a pedigree or ancestry chart. Family trees are often presented with the oldest generations at the top of the tree and the younger generations at the bottom. An ancestry chart, which is a tree showing the ancestors of an individual and not all members of a family, will more closely resemble a tree in shape, being wider at the top than at the bottom. In some ancestry charts, an individual appears on the left and his or her ancestors appear to the right. Conversely, a descendant chart, which depicts all the descendants of an individual, will be narrowest at the top. Beyond these formats, some family trees might include all members of a particular surname (e.g., male-line descendants). Yet another approach is to include all holders of a certain office, such as the Kings of Germany, which represents the reliance on marriage to link dynasties together.
The passage of time can also be included to illustrate ancestry and descent. A time scale is often used, expanding radially across the center, divided into decades. Children of the parent form branches around the center and their names are plotted in their birth year on the time scale. Spouses' names join children's names and nuclear families of parents and children branch off to grandchildren, and so on. Great-grandparents are often in the center to portray four or five generations, which reflect the natural growth pattern of a tree as seen from the top but sometimes there can be great-great-grandparents or more. In a descendant tree, living relatives are common on the outer branches and contemporary cousins appear adjacent to each other. Privacy should be considered when preparing a living family tree.[ citation needed ]
The image of the tree probably originated with that of the Tree of Jesse in medieval art, [2] used to illustrate the Genealogy of Christ in terms of a prophecy of Isaiah (Isaiah 11:1). Possibly the first non-biblical use, and the first to show full family relationships rather than a purely patrilineal scheme, was that involving family trees of the classical gods in Boccaccio's Genealogia Deorum Gentilium ("On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles"), whose first version dates to 1360. [3]
In addition to familiar representations of family history and genealogy as a tree structure, there are other notable systems used to illustrate and document ancestry and descent.
An Ahnentafel (German for "ancestor table") is a genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors in a fixed sequence of ascent:
and so on, back through the generations. Apart from the subject or proband, who can be male or female, all even-numbered persons are male, and all odd-numbered persons are female. In this scheme, the number of any person's father is double the person's number, and a person's mother is double the person's number plus one. This system can also be displayed as a tree:
| 4. Paternal grandfather | |||||||||||
| 2. Father | |||||||||||
| 5. Paternal grandmother | |||||||||||
| 1 Subject (or proband) | |||||||||||
| 6. Maternal grandfather | |||||||||||
| 3. Mother | |||||||||||
| 7. Maternal grandmother | |||||||||||
A fan chart features a half circle chart with concentric rings: the subject is the inner circle, the second circle is divided in two (each side is one parent), the third circle is divided in four, and so forth. Fan charts depict paternal and maternal ancestors.
While family trees are depicted as trees, family relations do not in general form a tree in the strict sense used in graph theory, since distant relatives can mate. Therefore, a person can have a common ancestor on both their mother's and father's side. However, because a parent must be born before their child, an individual cannot be their own ancestor, and thus there are no loops. In this regard, ancestry forms a directed acyclic graph. Nevertheless, graphs depicting matrilineal descent (mother-daughter relationships) and patrilineal descent (father-son relationships) do form trees. Assuming no common ancestor, an ancestry chart is a perfect binary tree, as each person has exactly one mother and one father; these thus have a regular structure. A Descendant chart, on the other hand, does not, in general, have a regular structure, as a person can have any number of children or none at all.
Family trees have been used to document family histories across time and cultures throughout the world.
In Africa, the ruling dynasty of Ethiopia claimed descent from King Solomon via the Queen of Sheba. Through this claim, the family traced their descent back to the House of David.
The genealogy of Ancient Egyptian ruling dynasties was recorded from the beginnings of the Pharaonic era c. 3000 BC to the end of the Ptolomaic Kingdom; although this is not a record of one continuously linked family lineage, and surviving records are incomplete.
Elsewhere in Africa, oral traditions of genealogical recording predominate. Members of the Keita dynasty of Mali, for example, have had their pedigrees sung by griots during annual ceremonies since the 14th century. Meanwhile, in Nigeria, many ruling clans—most notably those descended from Oduduwa—claim descent from the legendary King Kisra. Here too, pedigrees are recited by griots attached to the royal courts. [5]
In some pre-contact Native American civilizations, genealogical records of ruling and priestly families were kept, some of which extended over several centuries or longer.
There are extensive genealogies for the ruling dynasties of China, but these do not form a single, unified family tree. Additionally, it is unclear at which point(s) the most ancient historical figures named become mythological.
In Japan, the ancestry of the Imperial Family is traced back to the mythological origins of Japan. The connection to persons from the established historical record only begins in the mid-first millennium AD.
The longest family tree in the world is that of the Chinese philosopher and educator Confucius (551–479 BC), who is descended from King Tang (1675–1646 BC). The tree spans more than 80 generations from him and includes more than 2 million members. An international effort involving more than 450 branches around the world was started in 1998 to retrace and revise this family tree. A new edition of the Confucius genealogy was printed in September 2009 by the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee, to coincide with the 2560th anniversary of the birth of the Chinese thinker. This latest edition was expected to include some 1.3 million living members who are scattered around the world today. [6]
Before the Dark Ages, in the Greco-Roman world, some reliable pedigrees dated back perhaps at least as far as the first half of the first millennium BC; with claimed or mythological origins reaching back further. Roman clan and family lineages played an important part in the structure of their society and were the basis of their intricate system of personal names. However, there was a break in the continuity of record-keeping at the end of Classical Antiquity. Records of the lines of succession of the Popes and the Eastern Roman Emperors through this transitional period have survived, but these are not continuous genealogical histories of single families. Refer to descent from antiquity.
Many noble and aristocratic families of European and West Asian origin can reliably trace their ancestry back as far as the mid to late first millennium AD; some claiming undocumented descent from Classical Antiquity or mythological ancestors. In Europe, for example, the pedigree of Niall Noígíallach would be a contender for the longest, through Conn of the Hundred Battles (fl. 123 AD)[ citation needed ]; in the legendary history of Ireland, he is further descended from Breogán, and ultimately from Adam, through the sons of Noah.
Another very old and extensive tree is that of the Lurie lineage—which includes Sigmund Freud and Martin Buber—and traces back to Lurie, a 13th-century rabbi in Brest-Litovsk, and from there to Rashi and purportedly back to the legendary King David, as documented by Neil Rosenstein in his book The Lurie Legacy. [7] The 1999 edition of the Guinness Book of Records recorded the Lurie family in the "longest lineage" category as one of the oldest-known living families in the world today. [8]
Family trees and representations of lineages are also important in religious traditions. The biblical genealogies of Jesus also claim descent from the House of David, covering a period of approximately 1000 years. In the Torah and Old Testament, genealogies are provided for many biblical persons, including a record of the descendants of Adam. Also according to the Torah, the Kohanim are descended from Aaron. Genetic testing performed at the Technion has shown that most modern Kohanim share common Y-chromosome origins, although there is no complete family tree of the Kohanim. In the Islamic world, claimed descent from Muhammad greatly enhanced the status of political and religious leaders; new dynasties often used claims of such descent to help establish their legitimacy.
Elsewhere, in many human cultures, clan and tribal associations are based on claims of common ancestry, although detailed documentation of those origins is often very limited.
Forms of family trees are also used in genetic genealogy. In 2022, scientists reported the largest detailed human genetic genealogy, that unifies human genomes from many sources for insights about human history, ancestry and evolution and demonstrates a novel computational method for estimating how human DNA is related via a series of 13 million linked trees along the genome, a tree-sequence,[ clarification needed ] which has been described as the largest "human family tree". [9] [10] [11]
Genealogy is the study of families, family history, and the tracing of their lineages. Genealogists use oral interviews, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and to demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are often displayed in charts or written as narratives. The field of family history is broader than genealogy, and covers not just lineage but also family and community history and biography.
The Ynglings were a dynasty of kings, first in Sweden and later in Norway, primarily attested through the poem Ynglingatal. The dynasty also appears as Scylfings in Beowulf. When Beowulf and Ynglingatal were composed sometime in the eighth to tenth centuries, their respective authors expected their audience to have a great deal of background information about these kings, which is shown in the allusiveness of the references.
Y-chromosomal Aaron is the name given to the hypothesized most recent common ancestor of the patrilineal Jewish priestly caste known as Kohanim. According to the traditional understanding of the Hebrew Bible, this ancestor was Aaron, the brother of Moses.
An ancestor, also known as a forefather, fore-elder, or a forebear, is a parent or (recursively) the parent of an antecedent. Ancestor is "any person from whom one is descended. In law, the person from whom an estate has been inherited."
A pedigree chart is a diagram that shows the occurrence and appearance of phenotypes of a particular gene or organism and its ancestors from one generation to the next, most commonly humans, show dogs, and race horses.
In biology and genetic genealogy, the most recent common ancestor (MRCA), also known as the last common ancestor (LCA), of a set of organisms is the most recent individual from which all the organisms of the set are descended. The term is also used in reference to the ancestry of groups of genes (haplotypes) rather than organisms.
Genetic genealogy is the use of genealogical DNA tests, i.e., DNA profiling and DNA testing, in combination with traditional genealogical methods, to infer genetic relationships between individuals. This application of genetics came to be used by family historians in the 21st century, as DNA tests became affordable. The tests have been promoted by amateur groups, such as surname study groups or regional genealogical groups, as well as research projects such as the Genographic Project.
In genealogy, the progenitor is the – sometimes legendary – founder of a family, line of descent, clan or tribe, noble house, or ethnic group. Genealogy understands a progenitor to be the earliest recorded ancestor of a consanguineous family group of descendants.
This family tree is about the relatives of the Islamic prophet Muhammad as a family member of the family of Hashim and the Quraysh tribe which is ‘Adnani. According to Islamic tradition, Muhammad descends from the biblical Ishmael through the Hashem tribe.
A genealogical DNA test is a DNA-based genetic test used in genetic genealogy that looks at specific locations of a person's genome in order to find or verify ancestral genealogical relationships, or to estimate the ethnic mixture of an individual. Since different testing companies use different ethnic reference groups and different matching algorithms, ethnicity estimates for an individual vary between tests, sometimes dramatically.
In genetic genealogy, the identical ancestors point (IAP), or all common ancestors (ACA) point, or genetic isopoint, is the most recent point in a given population's past such that each individual alive at that point either has no living descendants, or is the ancestor of every individual alive in the present. This point lies further in the past than the population's most recent common ancestor (MRCA).
In European genealogy, a descent from antiquity is a proven unbroken line of descent between specific individuals from ancient history and people living today. Descents can readily be traced back to the Early Middle Ages, but beyond that, insufficient documentation of the ancestry of the new royal and noble families of the period makes tracing them to historical figures from antiquity challenging. Though the subject of ongoing effort, no well-researched, historically-documented generation-by-generation genealogical descents are known to exist in Europe.
The Angles were a dominant Germanic tribe in the Anglo-Saxon settlement of Britain, and gave their name to the English, England and to the region of East Anglia. Originally from Angeln, present-day Schleswig-Holstein, a legendary list of their kings has been preserved in the heroic poems Widsith and Beowulf, and the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.
A royal descent is a genealogical line of descent from a past or present monarch.
Descent from Genghis Khan in East Asia is well documented by Chinese sources. His descent in West Asia and Europe was documented through the 14th century, in texts written by Rashid-al-Din Hamadani and other Muslim historians. With the advent of genealogical DNA testing, a larger and broader circle of people have begun to claim descent from Genghis Khan owing to dubious and imprecise haplogroup identifications. However, while many of Genghis Khan's agnates' resting places are known, none of their remains have been tested to prove or disprove these theories and debate continues.
The O'Neill dynasty are a lineage of Irish Gaelic origin that held prominent positions and titles in Ireland and elsewhere. As kings of Cenél nEógain, they were historically one of the most prominent family of the Northern Uí Néill, along with the O'Donnell dynasty. Some O'Neills state that their ancestors were kings of Ailech during the Early Middle Ages, as descendants of Niall of the Nine Hostages.
This is a family tree of the main line of descent of Confucius.
A number of royal genealogies of the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms, collectively referred to as the Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies, have been preserved in a manuscript tradition based in the 8th to 10th centuries.
Yichus, a Hebrew-based Yiddish word meaning "lineage". In some past and present Jewish communities, good yichus—meaning descent from a family of high reputation—is necessary for a person to be considered as a potential marriage partner. Colloquially, the term refers to the chain of origin for a statement, creative work or object.
Peter Francis Mills, self-styled as Petros I Palaeologus, was an English eccentric and pretender from the Isle of Wight. Mills believed that his mother's last name, Colenutt, was derived from Koloneia, an ancient province of the Byzantine Empire, and consequently believed himself to be descended from the Palaiologos dynasty, the empire's final ruling family. Though his genealogy was never completely finished, Mills took the titles "Despot and Autokrator of the Romans" and "Duke of Morea", though he never achieved any widespread recognition and never seriously attempted to enforce his claims. Mills was often seen around his hometown of Newport dressed either in a military uniform or long, flowing robes. Upon his death in 1988, Mills' second wife Patricia took up his claim as "Empress of the Romans", his children by his first wife having denounced his pretensions as a "utter sham".
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