Family Tree
Seven generations of my direct ancestors, 127 people in all, charted by where and when they were born. Then the wider tree of 864 relatives, charted by how far they travelled.
Each picture below is a still. Open the interactive version to hover over any flag, dot or arc and see the person behind it.
The direct line
Two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents: go back seven generations and there are 127 people on the chart. The first five charts show only these direct ancestors.
Where they were born: the fan
How to read it. I am at the centre. Each ring outward is one generation further back: two parents, four grandparents, and so on to the 64 ancestors of the seventh generation on the outer edge. My father’s side is on the left, my mother’s on the right. Every person is drawn as the flag of the country where they were born.
What it shows. The four inner generations are entirely American. Step out to the fifth and the tree abruptly becomes European: of the 127 people, 60 were born in the United States, 21 in Switzerland, 12 in England, 11 in Scotland, 8 in Wales and 6 in Denmark. In the seventh generation alone, only a third were born in America.
Open the interactive chart →Where they were born: the pedigree
How to read it. The same data as the fan, laid out as a classic pedigree. I am the single flag at the bottom; each row above is the generation before, with lines joining every person to their two parents.
What it shows. The straight rows make it easier to follow one line upward. Two colonial-era births are shown under the Grand Union flag, and one lone Australian flag marks an ancestor born in Sydney.
Open the interactive chart →When they were born
How to read it. Each dot is one ancestor. Left to right runs backward in time, from today to 1700. Bottom to top counts generations. Colour marks the country of birth, and the thin threads connect each person to their parents. The dashed line marks 1847, the year the Salt Lake Valley was settled.
What it shows. Seven generations span 225 years, from my own birth in 1988 back to 1763. A generation averages just under 32 years. The spread widens going back: my four grandparents were born within seven years of one another, while the seventh generation’s births stretch across seven decades.
Open the interactive chart →How far from home they were born
How to read it. The same people and the same time axis, but height now shows how far each ancestor was born from where I live today, in Fayetteville, Georgia. The scale is logarithmic, so each step up is a multiplication, not an addition.
What it shows. A fork. Ancestors born between about 1840 and 1930 nearly all sit in one tight band about 1,600 miles away: Utah, Idaho and Nevada. Before that the line splits in two. One branch jumps to four or five thousand miles (Switzerland, Britain, Denmark); the other drops to a few hundred miles (the American South and East). Two separate populations met in the Mountain West.
Open the interactive chart →How far from Provo they were born
How to read it. The same chart re-centred on Provo, Utah, where I was born. Dotted lines mark familiar distances: Salt Lake City at 38 miles, St. George at 240, New York City at about 2,000, Yorkshire and Zürich at about 5,000.
What it shows. Measured from Utah, the fork becomes a basin. The oldest generations start far away, in Europe and the eastern United States. Around the 1850s they arrive, and for the next hundred years almost every birth in the tree happens within 300 miles of Provo.
Open the interactive chart →The whole tree
The full tree holds 864 people in 143 families: the direct line plus their brothers, sisters, spouses and children. These three charts use everyone with enough recorded detail.
Born there, died here
How to read it. One arc for each of 740 people with both a known birthplace and a known place of death, drawn from the first to the second. Magenta arcs crossed an ocean, orange arcs moved 500 to 2,500 miles, blue arcs moved less. Grey dots mark people who died within 25 miles of where they were born.
What it shows. Nearly every long arc ends in the same place: the Salt Lake Valley. They start in Zürich, Copenhagen, Yorkshire, Wales and New England. Two arcs stop in the middle of the Atlantic, for relatives who died at sea during the crossing. 212 people never left home at all.
Open the interactive chart →How far they moved in a lifetime
How to read it. Each dot is one person, placed by the year they were born and by the distance between where they were born and where they died. The black line is the median for each decade. The shaded band marks 1840 to 1890, the years of the gathering to Utah.
What it shows. One cohort did almost all of the moving. People born between 1800 and 1840 ended their lives a median of 1,257 miles from where they began. Every other cohort, before and after, has a median between roughly 100 and 270 miles. A single generation crossed the world, and their children stayed put.
Open the interactive chart →Children per family
How to read it. One bar for each family size, counting the 110 families in the tree with at least one recorded child. The dark bar marks the median.
What it shows. The median family had seven children, and families of eight to eleven were common. Between them these 110 families had 745 children; the largest had sixteen. The tall bar at one child is probably an artefact: a family often enters the tree through a single documented child, with siblings missing from the record.
Open the interactive chart →About the data
- Built from a family tree of 864 individuals and 143 families, with 672 distinct places located on the map.
- Living relatives are shown without names, dates or birthplaces.
- Four Swiss ancestors are dated from christening records, not birth records.
- Five American birthplaces are known only to the county, and are placed at the county’s centre.
- The whole-tree charts over-represent the branches that have been researched hardest. The direct-line charts do not have that bias.
- The record stops at the seventh generation: none of those 64 ancestors has parents linked yet.