The Royal Family Tree
Whether you’re one of those pioneering longhaulers or a beginner genealogist wanting to use an existing system, let’s take a deep dive into the world of genealogical numbering systems. They can be divided into three types: ancestral, descendant, and combination.
Note: We’ll demonstrate each system using the genealogy of a famous pedigree, the royal family of the United Kingdom (with Queen Elizabeth II or her son William, Duke of Cambridge, as the root person). For reference, you can see a more traditional family tree of Elizabeth II’s direct-line descendants (including her grandson William) on the opposite page.
ANCESTRAL-NUMBERING SYSTEMS: THE AHNENTAFEL SYSTEM
Keeping track of direct ancestors in a numbering system is reasonably straightforward, so it should not be surprising that the earliest example of such a system can be found more than 400 years ago. Austrian historian Michael Eytzinger published a genealogical work (Thesaurus Principum Hac Aetate In Europa Viventium) documenting royal European houses in 1590.
This Eytzinger Method, known in German as an Ahnentafel (in English, “ancestor table”), was picked up by two later genealogists: Jeronimo de Sosa and Stephan Kekule von Stradonitz. Sosa, a Spanish Franciscan friar and genealogist, wrote about the method in 1676 in his work Noticia de la Gran Casa de los Marqueses de. And von Stradonitz, a German lawyer and genealogist, popularized the Ahnentafel method in his 1898 work .
