Everyone understands and loves the Pedigree chart. It's easy to follow your family lines are intutive. It makes a great wall decoration. Of course if complete coverage of a significant number of generations is to be included, the chart tends to become unwieldy. Worse yet, how can you represent 20 generations (that someone can actually follow) on a computer screen with it?

The Ahnentafel presentation is able to show exactly the same information as a Pedigree chart while remaining in a single column. But how do you follow your family lines? Some simple rules will help.

The Ahnentafel uses a simple number system as follows: You can always find a persons father by just doubling that persons Ahnentafel number. Double that number and you have his father. A persons wife always has an Ahnentafel number 1 higher than her husband. Of course if you double her number it will give you the number of her father; then add 1 and you'll get her mother. So you can follow someones pedigree from generation to generation this way.

Here's an example. We'll show a scaled down Pedigree and its Ahnentafel. Ahnentafel numbers are attached to each name in the Pedigree just for this example.

Notice how you can follow your fathers side just by doubling the number, e.g. 1, 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, 64, and so on. You could follow the male side for you mother with 3, 6, 12, 24, 48, …. For each of these, the wife would be just one higher, e.g. 3, 5, 9, 17, 33, 65 on you fathers side and 7, 13, 25, 49 on your mothers side. So it's really very easy to go from generation to generation following any line.

Here is a portion of a real Ahnentafel listing:

Notice that Catharina must be Johan's wife since her Ahnentafel number is one greater. If we divided 2048 in half (1024) we have the Ahnentafel number of the son in generation 11 who is our relative. We know it's his son because the number is EVEN. Same for Thomas, his daugher will be #1025 since this is an ODD number. Williams son is our relative since 2064/2 = 1032 which is even.

If we have information in the 13^th Generation for these folks their fathers will have numbers 4096,4098, 4100, and 4128 and their mothers will be 4097, 4099, 4101, and 4129. If everyone is known up through this 12^th Generation there would be 2^N -1 = 2^12 -1 = 4095 people on this chart; easy to list but a bit bulky for a pedigree chart.

Just as some Pedigree Charts show a minimum of information while others show more, the Ahnentafel can do the same. In this one we've chosen to use all the data available except notes and images. To save some trees we've used abbreviations for birth (b), died (d) and so on and compressed the available information as much as possible without much regard to readability. The number just after the name is unique to our database; it's called the RIN and helps us if you contact us for any additional information. RINs simply indicate the order in which we entered the data so you can see that we entered William before we entered the other three above.

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