My Family is a Mess. So is Yours.
Bill Shander
Author of "Stakeholder Whispering: Uncover What People Need Before Doing What They Ask", keynote speaker, workshop leader, LinkedIn Learning Instructor. Information design, data storytelling & visualization, creativity.
One of the great unsolved challenges in data visualization is the family tree.
A family tree is just a network diagram and, like many network diagrams, it can devolve into a complete mess of a hairball very very quickly. Unlike some network diagrams (like, say, a diagram of every server on the Internet), where the primary goal is to see broad patterns of interconnectedness and isolation and broad relationships between node clusters, a family tree generally demands a very honed in personalized view of the data.
Maybe you have a diagram that focuses on you, your parents, and your grandparents. It likely includes aunts and uncles and cousins, but it doesn't expand to include every single spouse of every single cousin and their offspring and their spouse's parents, sixth cousins, etc. If it did, eventually you would have the entire world population (and ancestry) going back deep into the fossil record, since ultimately we're all connected, right? How many billions of data points would that be?
Most consumers of family trees really want to see themselves and their most important connections. In my family, for instance, I have a cousin who's sitting off to the side, at the far edge of the visual, as though he doesn't have 150 people around him based on his extended family's connections, which are more distant to me. I think he would want to see his family expanded if I were to share my tree with him, right?
But what would you want to do? You want to see your closest connections, but you also want to see how you're connected to some other specific person. Maybe you want to understand the term for your connection with someone ("third cousin once removed"). Maybe you want to finally understand how that person is simultaneously your uncle and your cousin.
I've come across some interesting approaches to solve some of these problems, but all of them are flawed in some way. Not least of which is the complexity inherent to some families. As the title of this post suggests, my family is a complete mess. Back in the day, cousins married cousins, one guy married his ex-wife's sister, someone else married his niece, and there are many people with multiple marriages with kids with multiple partners. Not only is some of this taboo culturally (I can't believe I'm sharing this!) but it also makes a visual representation even more of a mess.
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Call me ambitious. Call me delusional. Call me destined for failure. I'm going to give it a shot. I'm going to try to come up with an interactive, personalizable, visual solution to the family tree.
HELP!
My ask of you is to help me by telling me what you would want from a tool like this. Have you ever had a family tree? What worked and what didn't work? How could that have been improved - either in design, or functionality, or some other way? I'm open to any ideas! Please drop any thoughts in the comments below. And thank you in advance!
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I've honestly never thought about this conundrum, but now that you bring it up, it is quite an interesting problem to solve. In visuals I make, I emphasize importance by making the salient information easier to read. That might be a bigger icon, an artificial border, or some kind of highlighting. Without knowing specifically what someone is looking for in a family tree makes it difficult to highlight what is important, however. I imagine a tree where my immediate family is the biggest visually, with further connections getting progressively smaller. I might also like to see people who married into the family highlighted differently.
Founder @ StepUp.One | Reskilling and Employing Refugees
3 å¹´Nc
Biomedical Visualization Specialist
3 年Very interesting! My mother and her sisters are deeply entrenched in our family tree. Often, I have no clue who they are talking about. If only I could see a relationship map when listening to my mom. We tried printing out the tree from Family Tree Maker—it was impossible. The resulting data would have to run an extraordinary length around the room, which would mean taping a ton of papers end-to-end. Forget that!
Self Employed at Self Employed
3 å¹´ps - every situation you identified in your family is commonplace in European American families (among others), even though most don't recognize it. Everybody's family is 'a mess.' I find the fan chart easiest to grok with larger more complex families. I'd love a 3rd version.
Self Employed at Self Employed
3 å¹´Well you know I love seeing this post! Several of the things you are interested in are offered in FamilySearch, however imperfectly. You must vet the data for each person's record and connections of course, but one thing I use regularly there is the "View My Relationship" which immediately names your most direct relationship and maps it. As you noted, often you will have multiple relationships to that person, and there are ways to cheat the system to get at those, but it would be nice to be able to see them easily. Since it is one world tree, you can also look up a person you haven't yet connected - King Charlemagne, Johnny Cash, the family down the road - and find your relationship. You then have to vet the connection of course, but you've got a map. I'm going to share this post on the VGL account and see what suggestions members may have.