A New Way to Draw Genealogy: the "Marriage-Node" Model & the Sample Tree
Why a new engine for genealogy?
Real families are not simple trees. They hold polygyny, divorce, widowhood and remarriage, cousin marriages that connect one person to more than one branch, and mothers whose names the sources sometimes never preserved. Traditional renderers assume "one spouse, one line," and so they hide part of the truth, duplicate people, or break the shape. We rebuilt the way trees are drawn from scratch to represent a family as it actually is, not as a simplified template dictates.
The "Āl ʿAbd Allāh" sample tree on the platform is a safe showcase for this engine: fictional people, designed specifically to exhibit the hard cases (polygyny, divorce, widowhood, a woman’s lineage extending into her own family) without touching any real family’s privacy.
The "marriage-node" model
The core idea is that the marriage itself is a node in the diagram: a small circle joining the couple, from which their children descend. This differs from the traditional spouse "comb" that lines wives up beside the man and hangs all children below him without telling which mother is which. With the marriage node it becomes clear: who married whom, which children belong to each marriage, and the state of every relationship.
Each relationship’s state is encoded visually: a solid line with a blue circle for an ongoing marriage, a hollow circle for divorce, a grey circle with a dotted ring for a union ended by death, and an amber colour for a concubinage (milk yamīn). A viewer reads the structure from the shapes alone, with a persistent "relationship key" in the corner.
How the hard cases are handled
- Polygyny & remarriage: every marriage gets its own node, circle and children; a wife’s prior marriages render as an independent nested block, however many layers deep.
- Cousin marriage & converging lineage: when a person connects to more than one branch, they are drawn in FULL exactly once (their canonical home) and appear elsewhere as a compact reference pointing to the common ancestor where the two lines meet, no duplication, nothing lost.
- Collapse & expand: collateral branches fold behind a "+N" control to keep the view clean, and open on demand; a counter shows visible people out of the whole tree.
- Unnamed mothers: if a source did not preserve the mother’s name we neither invent one nor draw a fake card, we state plainly that the name is unrecorded (research trees) or show a clear slot to add her (family trees).
One engine for every tree
The same method drives every tree on the platform: your own family tree, the sample tree, and the research genealogy of the Prophet ﵌. There is no per-tree code. That means any design improvement or behavioural fix reaches every tree and every user at once, consistency guaranteed by construction, not by manual effort.
Engineering-wise, data flows down one strict pipeline: flat data (one row per person; structure from father/mother links) feeds a pure mathematical transform that produces the scene, which in turn feeds a renderer with no data logic at all. Every coordinate is computed; there is not a single hand-placed position in the drawing.
A quality gate before publishing
Because every deploy touches every tree, we put automatic guards in front of it: a set of integrity rules checked before any import (no marriage to a direct ancestor, no same-sex union, no cycles in the lineage, no child without both parents, referential integrity). If the data violates one, publication is refused. Dozens of conformance tests additionally verify the drawing does not shift by a single pixel between versions.
This discipline is what lets us iterate quickly without fear: we improve the design continuously, trusting the guards to keep any error away from your tree.
The experience
- Instant search for anyone (by name, with father and generation), then jump to and highlight them in place without losing context.
- A page per person: name, honorific, dates, tribe, biography, children, spouses and parents.
- Arabic right-to-left and English left-to-right, with an instant language switch.
- Member photos, kunyas auto-derived on family trees, and a layout that works well on mobile.
The new design is not a cosmetic refresh; it is a rethink of how a family is represented digitally: faithful to the truth, consistent across every tree, and keeping the data owned by the people it belongs to.