All my known ancestors 2009-05-28

Toying with my script from the previous post... Not limiting the number of generations, and processing it with neato instead of dot (still from Graphviz) gives this cool diagram... I haven't tried removing overlaps. I also have some changes to allow including siblings (the diagram below includes only direct ancestors). Posting it mostly because it looks neat, and it illustrates pretty well how exponential growth quickly makes family trees unwieldly. Our family database contains thousands of people not in the diagram below - siblings of everyone there, as well as the spouses and descendants of siblings, and for the most part this stretches "only" back to the early 1700's, with a few spindly arms going back to about 1480:




(Click for a somewhat larger version -- I haven't posted a full size one as it's HUGE; maybe when I've cleaned it up a bit more)

When I've had time to do some more cleanups I'll probably post a more recent iteration of the script I'm using.