Family graphs vs genealogy: mapping people you actually talk to

Most family-mapping tools are built for genealogy: who descended from whom across generations, dates of birth and death, places of origin. That's a lineage tree, and it's the right shape for ancestry research. It's the wrong shape for the question you actually have at 8pm on a Thursday: which Anna are we talking about - the one whose dad just retired, or the one married to your cousin's husband? That's a relationship graph - small, lateral, current.

The two questions are: who's this person to whom? (sister of, partner of, raised by) and what's currently going on with them? (illness, move, baby, retirement). Genealogy answers neither in real time; the dates it tracks are the wrong ones. A family graph holds the current shape of relationships, with enough context to greet people correctly the next time you see them.

Ancestry tools are optimised for the past: each node has a birth + a death + parents. They don't carry status ("recovering from surgery"), they don't carry chosen-family edges ("calls Anita mum but biological mother is Sara"), and they treat partners as a marriage event rather than a current state. The interface itself encourages adding ancestors you've never met and discourages adding the half-sister you actually drink coffee with monthly. Different tool, different problem.

What's actually load-bearing is small. Contact Book ships four primitives: per-contact relationships ("Anna - sister of Tom"), life events with dates ("Tom: knee surgery, March"), a contact card per person (so each appears once with their context), and notes that survive renames. Pets count too - "Tom has a dog called Pepper" is a real conversational anchor at the next dinner. That's the whole minimum-viable family graph for a personal-CRM use case.

Real families don't fit a neat tree. Chosen family (godparents, family-by-friendship) belongs in the graph but isn't biological. Step-relations (Tom's stepmom Marie) are first-class current relationships, not historical footnotes. Estranged ties are still relationships - you don't talk, but you should remember the topic so you don't blunder into it. Exes who stayed close matter. Polyamorous partnerships matter. The graph should treat all of these as edges with custom labels rather than forcing them into a narrow set.

There's a creepy line and it's worth respecting. The graph belongs to you, with your perspective. It's not a panopticon over your wider family. Don't store medical details a person didn't agree to be remembered for. Don't track relationships between third parties you have no business observing (a sister's friend's relationship status). Don't write things you wouldn't be comfortable being read aloud to the person if your phone got picked up. The honest test: if the contact themselves saw their card, would they recognise the version of them you wrote, and feel respected by it? If not, the line is somewhere behind you.