Just in case you guys hadn't looked lately - I'm over halfway to my goal of playing through 20 generations of Sims. You can take a look at the family tree here. As I was updating the page with the newest generations, I got to thinking .... it's not exactly a tree. When you see pictures of people's family trees on big genealogical charts (especially those charts that are trying to prove some sort of important something), well, they actually look like trees, because they show both sides evenly, or as evenly as possible.
I was going to include some sort of pictoral reference point here - maybe the family tree of some country's monarchy, but the more I looked at all of them, the more I realised that theirs don't really look like trees either... more like tangled, mish-mashed webs.
My sims? Well, I mainly just trace the heir's line, and show who they married, and any siblings, but that's about it. A lot of the time I can't show any more for the spouses' own personal lineages, as they are usually random townies generated by the game who don't have any parents at all. If they do have them, it only goes back one generation, and that's not much to add to the tree. Plus it makes it messy-looking. *** Edited to say I went back and added all known relatives, just to make it as accurate as possible. It looks messy, but the completionist in me is happy. The link above should still take you to the updated version. ***
I'm beginning to think they shouldn't look like trees at all.
It's also really rare for me to marry off the siblings as well, but the one or two times it's happened I was sure to show at least their spouse and any of their children - but again, with only an eight person limit to households, and never mind the fact that most of the time I've got at least three, if not four generations in the house at one time, it's hard to include everyone and their siblings. Hence the reason why most of my generations are only children, because I just don't have room for more than one. Let's not talk about Aegon's children. That was a fluke.
Yeah, we'll just call it a family vine.
