The Patten Family Tree chart includes eight generations of the ancestors of Bruce Kenneth Patten, arranged in landscape format over several pages. You will notice that each person in the following family tree is preceded by a number. This number is determined by each person’s place in an Ahnentafel array.

Patten Family Tree [PDF]

Ahnentafel Explained

Ahnentafel is a construct used in genealogy to display a person’s ancestry compactly, without the need for a diagram such as a family tree, which is particularly useful in situations where one may be restricted to using plain text, for example in e-mails or newsgroup articles. This term Ahnentafel is a loan word from the German language, meaning a genealogical chart or diagram showing the ancestors of one person in the form of a binary tree, or family tree.

An Ahnentafel is effectively a method for storing a binary tree in an array by listing the nodes (individuals) in level-order (in generation-order). The subject of the Ahnentafel is listed as #1, their father as #2 and their mother as #3, then their grandparents as #4 to #7, and so on back through the generations. In this scheme, any person’s father has double that person’s number, and a person’s mother has double the person’s number plus one. Apart from #1, who can be male or female, all even-numbered persons are male, and all odd-numbered persons are female.

For the purposes of the following charts, I consider myself to be #1. The charts themselves, start with my parents, #2 and #3.