A Note on Family Tree Design

The large numbers of offspring in successive generations of settler families poses challenges for creating family trees that show descent from multiple siblings in a single image. Consequently, the family trees in Belongings depart from both standard genealogical-descent charts and from anthropological kinship diagrams.

In many of the charts, a set of siblings occupies one row while their spouses are beneath them. This adaptation allows the reader to group spouses easily and more readily to see marriage trends within a specific family. This arrangement also permits an enitre generation to fit on a single screen or page view.

To show the van der Merwe family in detail, one chart shows the first generation of Cape-born children and their spouses. Each of the seven children who married and had children is then represented in a separate chart.

Other charts show repeated intermarriage among specific families.

Some charts include only selected members of a family in order to highlight significant relationships among siblings and cousins.

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Key for Family Trees

Genealogy charts

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Genealogy Charts