Project

I have a lot of relatives and figuring out who is who to who was always challenging for me. I just could not visualize in my head the phrases such as “your granddad’s sister’s husband’s third cousin’ sister’s mother.” One day I decided to collect genealogy information across all branches of my family and create a family tree. The results are shown above.

Family Galaxy

It soon became apparent that the tree organization wouldn’t work. To figure out the connection of some relatives, I needed to go four to five generations deep, which made the branches too wide and incomprehensible. Therefore, I decided to transform my Family Tree into Family Galaxy, and Branches into Constellations.

Organization

The general rule of the Galaxy is the closer you get to the center, the further back in time you go. There are a series of belts radiating from the center, each tagged with a Latin letter, with Alphas being the oldest.

The wider belts tagged with lower-case letters are for people. The narrower belts tagged with upper-case letters are for families people belong to. Lines show the connection of people to families: either their parents’ (older generation family) or their own (newer generation family).

Example

Legend