Waiting for the Family Tree

I spent the past weekend in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania on a brief holiday to go watch some minor league baseball. That explains the lack of posting the last few days. (Housekeeping note, this coming weekend is Orthodox Easter, so I’ll be on holiday for that as well.)

Whilst in Harrisburg I did other things besides watch baseball because minor league games are so much faster now. (Maybe more on that in another post.) So after a Sunday afternoon match, I grabbed my camera and went for a walk about town. Mostly I photographed buildings and things, but at one point I came upon a gentleman sitting reading a paper on a bench.

Except it wasn’t a person; it was a statue.

Entitled “Waiting”, the statue portrays a bespectacled man reading a newspaper with a briefcase and an upturned brimmed hat sitting neatly atop said briefcase. (I’d show you the photo, but it’s still on my camera waiting to be downloaded.)

I was curious what the man was reading. Was it relevant? Did it say something important? Or was it lorem ipsum or placeholder text?

As it turned out, the paper told the story of a founding family of Harrisburg via article headlines. But on the front page, we had a nice little family tree diagram. And that’s what makes this anecdote germane to this blog.

But what does it say?!

I cannot read the specific details, nor did I want to. The paper was angled downwards, light was fading as the sun was setting, and this was backlit enough already.

The sculpture dates from 1992, making that headline the most recent article. From that, I will probably be able to do some of my own research and create my own version of that family tree, because I could not read it and now I’m curious. But what appears to be happening is primarily the ancestors of one line of one person’s—this gentleman’s?—parents. But critiquing it further is complicated by the illegibility of the chart.

Of course I should point out that the point was probably not a legible genealogical descent chart, but rather to in a quick visual show the person in particular comes from a long line of people, presumably public servants all or most.

Credit for the piece goes to the sculptor, Seward J. Johnson Jr.

Even Older Family Trees

Yesterday we looked at a graphic about an old family tree, revealed by ancient DNA. But at the end of the day it is a family tree of descent for a human male. But mankind itself fits within a kind of family tree, the circle family tree of life.

The tree of life continues to evolve as we discover new species and then reconfigure what we have to fit what we now know. When I was a wee lad in school, we learned about the three kingdoms of life: plants, animals, and fungi. Bacteria were a separate branch.

A few weeks ago, however, I was reading an article about how a recent DNA analysis identified a new “supergroup” within our larger group of complex cellular life, eukaryotes (plants, animal, and fungi fall within this). Luckily for our purposes the article contains a small graphic at which we can take a look.

Humans are way, way, way down on the tree.

The diagram uses a fairly simple design. Two panels split the largest groupings into its branches whilst the second panel breaks up eukaryotes. Colour links the eukaryotes together and shows how they fit into the broader tree to the left, which uses dark grey and light blue for bacteria and archaea, respectively.

A nice additional touch was the designer’s decision to include a small icon that represents the name of the supergroups within eukaryotes. Because, as the text points out, we don’t have commonly known names for these supergroups. Did I know that we belong to the opisthokonts? Absolutely not. Although dog people may be upset that the cat got the call to represent animals.

Regardless of the design, you can still see in the second panel how people are more closely related to amoeba than we are plants. But this new supergroup, hemimastigotes, branches off from the rest of us eukaryotes at a very early point. And the DNA proves it.

Overall this was a really nice graphic to see in a fascinating article. Science is cool.

Credit for the piece goes to Lucy Reading-Ikkanda.

Old Family Trees

Another quick little post from a little while back, around Christmas news broke about the oldest family tree yet discovered. Researchers used DNA recovered from a 5700-year old tomb in the UK to piece together the relationships between the people interred within the tomb.

Graphic wise, we’re not talking about anything crazy or inventive here—it’s a family tree after all. But the designers did a nice job using colour to indicate the different family groups of descent, which were spatially organised within the tomb by the woman to whom the children were born. To be fair, it was all based upon the descendants of one man, but one man who had several wives.

What’s fascinating about this, however, is simply the age. We can go back nearly 6,000 years and simply from DNA create a family tree five generations deep.

The only thing I wish is that we had an accompanying map of the tomb, because that’s the other key part of the story. But at the end of the day I’ll always take a nice family tree.

Credit for the piece goes to Newcastle University’s design team.

Update on Tiffany

Last month on another Friday I shared some graphics from a video by CCP Grey that looked at the origin and history of the name Tiffany. It’s a great video and I highly recommend it. But last week he published…an addendum I guess you could call it.

The piece takes a look at a research path he took for the video. It happened to involve some history and genealogy, two things I personally enjoy, and found it to be a fascinating insight into his research process.

All the paths don’t lead to Rome

The screenshot above hints at the idea that sometimes work is not linear and, especially when I’m doing genealogy work, there are often tangents and dead ends. In other words, to an extent, I can relate.

Happy Friday, all.

Credit for the piece goes to CCP Grey.

Tiffany

Happy Friday, all. We made it through another week of Covid, vaccinations, asteroids, and all that pleasant stuff. So let’s end with an upbeat note.

Over on YouTube there’s a channel I have long enjoyed, CCP Grey, who creates videos about, well lots of things, but sometimes really interesting historical, geographical, and political topics.

This week he released a video about Tiffany. As in the name Tiffany.

In addition to some great 80s aesthetics, the video touches on a couple of things that particularly interest me.

You see names are an important part of genealogical research. After all, almost all of us have names. (Some infants died without names.) Now in my family, on both my mother’s and father’s side I have a lot of Johns. In fact, I broke a line of five consecutive John Barrys. But occasionally a family will have a rarer or more uncommon name that allows you to trace that individual and therefore his or her family through time and space/place.

Grey tracks the history of the name Tiffany from its possible origin to some reasons for its popularity in the 1980s. And that includes some great graphics like this chart tracking the number of children with the name.

Thinking I need breakfast…

In the screenshot above you can see one thought he has on why the name took off in the latter half of the 20th century after languishing for centuries.

But he also examined the family history of one Tiffany and how that became important in the cultural zeitgeist. And to do so he used a family tree.

Family trees, with so many deaths in infancy

It’s a nine-minute long video and well worth your time.

I think what’s interesting to consider, however, is how this story could be told for many if not most names. There’s a reason they exist and how, by pure happenstance, they survive and get passed down family lines.

Though I have to say I did a quick search in my family tree and I have not a single Tiffany.

Credit for the piece goes to CCP Grey.

Biden’s English Ancestry Revisited

Last week I posted about an article in the BBC on the English ancestry of American president Joe Biden. And these types of article are a bit pro forma, famous person has an article about their personal ancestry with a family tree attached. Interestingly, this article did not, just the timeline I mentioned and a graphic as part of an aside on the declining self-identification as English-American.

And that, normally is it. Perhaps the article comes out with a few revisions upon the famous person’s marriage, birth of children, and more rarely death, but that is it. Yesterday, however, the BBC posted a follow-up article about an English family claiming kinship with Joe Biden. This article, however, included a family tree of sorts.

With some interesting spacing here…

This isn’t a family tree in the traditional sense, I would argue it’s the sort of chart genealogists would use to highlight two parties’ relationship to their most recent common ancestor (MCRA). But this chart does something odd, it spaces out the generations inconsistently and so Joe Biden appears at the bottom, aligned with the grandchildren of Paul Harris, the man at the centre of the story.

If you compare the height/length of the lines linking the different generations you can see the lines on Biden’s side of the graphic are very long compared to those on the Harris’ side. This isn’t technically incorrect, but it muddies the water when it comes to understanding the generational differences. So I revisited the design below.

Now with more even spacing…

Here I dropped the photographs because, primarily, I don’t have access to them. But they also eat up valuable real estate and aren’t necessary to communicate the relationships. I kept the same distance between generations, which does a better job showing the relationship between Joe Biden and Paul Harris, who appear to be actual fifth cousins. Joe is clearly at a different level than that of Paul’s grandchildren.

I added some context with labelling the generational relationship. At the top we have William and James Biden, assuming they are brothers, listed as siblings. The next level down are first cousins, then second, &c. Beyond Paul, however, we have two additional generations that are removed from the same relationship level. This is where the confusing “once-removed” or “twice-removed” comes into play. One way to think of it is as the number of steps you need to take from, say, Paul’s grandchildren, to get to a common generational level. In their case two levels, hence the grandchildren are fifth cousins to Joe Biden, twice removed.

These types of charts are great to show narrow relationships. Because, if we assume that up until recently each of the generations depicted above had four or five children, that tree would be unwieldy at best to show the relationship between Paul’s family and Joe Biden. If you ever find yourself working on your family ancestry or history and need to show someone how you are related, this type of chart is a great tool.

Credit for the original goes to the BBC graphics department

Credit for my remake is mine.

The Chrysanthemum Throne

Today we move from the Iron Throne of Westeros (Game of Thrones) to the Chrysanthemum Throne of Japan. Emperor Akihito abdicated his throne in favour of his son Naruhito. Fascinatingly, because Japanese monarchs are not allowed to abdicate, the Japanese parliament had to pass a law allowing Akihito to do just that. It was also a one-time deal. The next emperor would need similar legislation should he ever want to abdicate. You will also note there are a lot of male pronouns in this paragraph. By law, women cannot inherit the throne. And when royal princesses marry, they leave the royal household.

Not surprisingly, the news today had some graphics depicting the family tree of the Japanese royal family. And you all know how much I am a sucker for genealogy related work. This piece comes from the BBC and it is pretty simple. It uses a nice grey bar to indicate the generations and some titling indicates who succeeds whom.

There ain't no Cersei here…
There ain’t no Cersei here…

The graphic also makes rather painfully clear that if Japan wants to preserve its monarchy, it will need to embrace some kind of reforms. There are only four males left in the line of succession and only one is likely to have any sons.

Credit for the piece goes to the BBC graphics department.

My Family Shrub?

One of the main objectives of my long weekend in Boston is to research my family history. Usually when you do that kind of research you see familiar visualisation forms: trees. And in this book on a New England ancestral family, I saw trees. But the problem is history is never as neat and clean as we would prefer it to be. Or at least as I would prefer it to be. And this is the tree I discovered for my ancestor George, the guy labelled N-1.

People need to stop naming their kids the same old names. It can make my research a pain in the arse.
People need to stop naming their kids the same old names. It can make my research a pain in the arse.

Normally family trees are direct lines of descent. But here the problem is that the current research cannot clearly state who the parents are of George. He can be one of two Georges, one the son of Francis and Tabitha and the other of Timothy and Elizabeth. So instead of a single trunk, we have more of a shrub-like set of parallel branches with lots of leaves.

But what I really liked about this graphic is that, one, it appears to have been made by being typeset on a typewriter instead of some fancy design software (the book was printed in 1984). And then for the researcher like me, the author took care to remove the names of people inconsequential for this particular line of enquiry. It shows the Georges of interest, including the known cousin labelled as C-1, and their parents but omits siblings. It is a very nice touch. (And made my life easier.)

Credit for the piece goes to Henry L. Bunker.

In-law Trees

Happy Friday, all. I’ve been busy preparing for a trip to Boston next week where I’ll continue to research my family’s history. But family trees and generational relationships between cousins can be confusing. Over at xkcd, however, it turns out the in-law relationships are more confusing.

It's all confusing…
It’s all confusing…

I don’t think I blame him.

Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

Genealogy of the Gods

Apologies for the lack of posting yesterday, but I had some travel difficulties returning from Canada. But today, we have a few photos of a family tree from a nice exhibit at the Musée de la Civilisation à Québec, or Museum of Civilisation, on the gods of Mount Olympus. My guided tour (in English) featured only the history of the gods—nothing really on the art or the style of the sculptures. But it was still pretty good.

I have three photos of the family tree, which is first presented in an elaborate glass piece that creates depth. Unfortunately this photo doesn’t quite capture the impressiveness. The next two are a smaller wall installation that highlights those gods that apparently lived on Mount Olympus and were thus the focus of the exhibit.

the tree on glass
the tree on glass

the tree in full
the tree in full

the tree in detrail
the tree in detrail

Credit for the piece goes to the graphics department at the Musée de la Civilisation à Québec.