In today’s digital era, researching family history is easier than ever before. We can now access vital records, military records, and censuses from centuries past with a click of a button. We can find distant relations through analysis of our DNA. Through resources like Ancestry.com, FamilySearch, Heritage Quest, and others, we can connect with others working to solve the same puzzles of our shared family trees. And with advances in technology and increased record digitization, finding out about your ancestors is likely to get even easier as time goes by.
Until someone invents time travel and messes it all up, that is.
One of my readers, upon hearing that my Place in Time series was getting a fourth book on October 29, suggested I put together a family tree to help them keep the characters straight, and I agreed that might be a useful diagram, considering the previous three time travel books spanned eight generations over a course of 222 years… and not necessarily in chronological order.
So, I started looking at different diagrams genealogists use to keep track of family history. My family has already done some research of our own lines (discovering among our ancestors a professional boxer, a convicted witch, a countess, a mayor, and two brothers who died in the Lady Elgin disaster), so I looked first to some of the trees we’ve used.
One common genealogical diagram is an ancestor chart, or pedigree. Whether presented horizontally or vertically, it starts with one person (usually the researcher themselves) and works backwards, showing their direct ancestors (parents, then grandparents, then great-grandparents, etc). Fan charts and circle charts are also other version of this type of tree, with the starting person in the center and their ancestors expanding outward. Sometimes, you’ll even see these in a bow tie shape, with a married couple in the center and the husband’s ancestors branching out on one side and the wife’s on the other. The advantage of these charts is that someone in the present-day can look back and see very clearly their direct ancestors. They’re usually quite clean, simple, and easy to read.
Another common type of genealogical diagram works from the top down, selecting one ancestor and then branching downward from them to show all their children, grandchildren, great-grandchildren, etc – one generation per line. This is generally called a descendants chart. They can be trickier than ancestor charts, because they include all the children of each person, which could be a lot of names, especially when you include remarriages and stepchildren. If each person in a generation marries and gives birth to even just three children, by the time you reach the fifth generation, you could be needing to make room for the names of 81 children and their spouses on a single line. As nice as it is to include siblings (who then become aunts and uncles and bear cousins to later generations), it’s easy to see how a chart like this could become unwieldy.
Both these basic chart types have one thing in common, though: it’s easy to tell the passage of time. Ancestor charts start at the present day and work backward into the past. Descendant charts start in the past and work toward the present. This is where it gets tricky for a time traveler… or those who choose to write about them.
In the case of the Place in Time series, for instance, the bottom generation belongs to Dr. Wells, despite him being older than the other characters in the books. Cassandra, despite being born in the 22nd century, gives birth to a child in the early 20th century. For this situation, a regular genealogical chart simply wouldn’t do.
I decided, therefore, to make use of the x-axis. While the y-axis still shows the generations as normal genealogical charts do, the x-axis shows the centuries that each of the characters lived in. (I did have to fudge the chart a bit to include Dodge, who is adopted into the family.) The blue box roughly shows their life span prior to time travel, with the lines continuing downward to the next generation at approximately the point in time when that child was born.
Someday in the future, if jumping up and down the timeline really becomes a feasible option, I imagine there will be many other people calling for these sorts of genealogical charts, and family trees will include much more complicated, tangled branches. (Just think of tree you’d have to make for the song “I’m My Own Grandpa”!) But for the time being, we’ll stick with our ancestor charts and descendant charts and be grateful that they only move chronologically in one simple, orderly direction.
***
Wendy Nikel is a speculative fiction author with a degree in elementary education, a fondness for road trips, and a terrible habit of forgetting where she’s left her cup of tea. Her short fiction has been published by Analog, Nature: Futures, Podcastle, and elsewhere. Her time travel novella series, beginning with THE CONTINUUM, is available from World Weaver Press. For more info, visit her website.