viz.

Image Credit: New York Times

Family trees are distinctively antiquated visual representations, yet they remain ubiquitous. In the past week alone, The Boston Herald published a family tree by the New England Historic Genealogical Society showing that Ben Affleck and Matt Damon are related and New York Times ran an interactive tree based on the research of genealogist Megan Smolenyak documenting Michelle Obama’s family history.  Both maps include the very familiar hierarchical arrangement of lines and circles or squares.  The Damon-Affleck map cuts right to the chase, foregoing all other strands, and directly linking the actors to William Knowlton Jr. (1615-1655). The First Lady’s genealogy is much more interested in the journey than the destination; each node of the tree has a short description of the family member and links to their genealogical record.  Looking at these two maps, I was led to consider why the family tree endures despite the wealth of technologies available for re-mapping relationships? Why does the old visual arrangement of radiating lines still seem to capture our attention?  And finally, what are we really mapping when we map kinship on a family tree?

Most immediately, the family tree implies the presence of roots—a metaphor that Alex Haley significantly mined in his book and miniseries.  The Times (London) used a similar visual metaphor in a family tree for Barack Obama in which they, rather tastelessly, represent his African ancestors as the roots and his American ancestors as the tree. 

Image Credit: Times (London)

Issues of subterranity are rendered even more explicit by trees revealing hidden histories, particularly, as in the case of Michelle Obama’s geneology, histories of slavery, interracial kinship and upward mobility.  On the New York Times’ “Room for Debate,” scholars discuss the significance and meanings of Michelle Obama’s family tree.  Among these voices, several expressed doubt about whether the family tree can generate significant public debate on the issues it reveals.  As Mary Frances Berry writes, “race-mixture stories have attracted sustained public interest only when some celebrity or a president, as in Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, is involved.”  Other scholars lamented the inability of the genealogical chart to tell the history it purports to represent.  Martha Hodges writes that the simple line connecting two individuals does not reveal the violence that could be contained in that encounter, particularly between a slave girl and an unknown white forbearer.  On the other hand, Ira Berlin points out that the connecting line not only obliterates violence, but also other complicated emotional connections between individuals.  In both cases, the family tree does not depict affective ties—whether those of pain, shame, betrayal, love or joy.

Image Credit Left: Clauset, Moore and Newman in Nature

Image Credit Right: The Boston Herald

In a recent article in Nature, “Networks: Teasing out the missing links,” Sid Reidner describes the limitations of the family tree's “highly unrealistic, insular population” in our age of increasingly complex social organizations.  Reidner cites work by Aaron Clauset, Cristopher Moore & M. E. J. Newman in creating a "hierarchical random graph" that represents the links omitted in a standard family tree.  While the creators of this model use it to predict relationships when information is missing, this chart also offers an interesting visual representation of relations that emphasizes the multiplicity of links, rather than the simple procreative line.  While a much messier affair, the Clauset, Moore and Newman model makes for a more compelling glimpse into the Affleck-Damon connection, for instance, than a tree– no matter how deep the roots.