Ancestral Connections in the Royal Families in One Infographic

Web designer from the Netherlands Nadieh Bremer published an interactive infographic called Royal Constellations where she showed ancestral connections in the European royal families during the past 1000 years.

“Royal & aristocratic families are known for their fondness of marrying within their own clique. Restraining aggression between two families, creating a stronger front towards a third family, increasing territorial acquisitions are some of the most common reasons,” Bremer says. “This leads to very interesting & entangled family trees: all 10 of the current hereditary royal leaders of Europe can be connected to each other through their ancestors.”

The visualization looks like a graph, with 10th century being its starting point, and consists of several hundred dots, each of them representing a member of a royal family. When a user presses on the dot, they see the map of connections of this royal with the others who lived before and after them.

The author also says that he can not guarantee that her work is historically accurate, as much information such as dates of birth and death of certain monarchs are known only approximately.