Who was connected to whom

1039 people, joined by 1760 recorded ties. Drag the year to see who was alive together.

Drawn only from recorded parentage and marriages. A line means the model holds a row saying so; no tie is inferred from a shared surname. 177 of them have no recorded parent, child or spouse and cannot appear here - that is a gap in the record, not a statement about them.

This is the Koup, not the whole tree. 301 people are put on this ground by a record - land they held or lived on, an estate, a burial, or a church occasion here - and the diagram is them, everyone descended from them, every direct ancestor above them however far back, and the people they married: 1216 of the 1646 the site publishes. Direct ancestry runs all the way because that line is how a family reached the Karoo. What stops is the sideways spread: the descendants of an ancestor are a Cape cousinhood this district never saw, and they are not here. The full rule, with its numbers.

The layout is computed once when the site is built and is the same every visit, so a cluster you learn the position of stays where you left it. Colour is the family line, the same colouring the map uses.