George's genealogy research produced a database of nearly 3,000 people spanning five and a half centuries. Names, dates, places, relationships — the raw material of a family's history.
The question now is: what do you do with it?
We're building thirteen interactive visualizations — each one a different lens on the same data. Together they reveal the shapes hiding inside the family tree: time, distance, absence, and connection. Each will be a web page you can open in any browser, explore, and share.
A cardiogram of the family across five centuries. Time runs left to right (1500–2026). Every birth pushes the line up. Every death pulls it down. Good decades have a strong pulse — births outnumber deaths. Bad decades flatline. You can see the Irish Famine, the World Wars, the baby booms. The family almost dying and recovering, readable as a vital sign.
The most recent decades show births only — living people have no death date yet. The pulse is still going.
Over two thousand people in the database have no relationships connected yet — no parents, no children, no spouse in the data. They aren't empty records; they have names, dates, places. They had families. The data just doesn't say who. This piece renders them as a star field against a dark background. Each orphan is a point of light. Brightness shows how much we know about them. Hover over a star to see a name. That might be all that survives.
The negative space of the project. The other pieces show connection. This one shows what's left when connection is absent.
A flowing chart where each first name is a colored stream. The stream rises when the name is popular and thins when it fades. "Mary" runs strong for 200 years — 73 people — then recedes. "John" (58) and "William" (44) flow through generation after generation. New names enter when new families marry in. Old names vanish when a branch ends.
"George" appears 20 times across the family — a stream that keeps coming back. Someone keeps choosing it.
When a name vanishes from the river, something was forgotten. When it returns, someone remembered.
Each family is a vertical stack of bars. Each bar is one child — filled if they survived to adulthood, faded if they died young or we don't know. A family of nine children with four surviving looks very different from a modern family of two. Line them up chronologically and you can see the demographic revolution happening inside your own family: tall, hollow stacks before 1900 giving way to shorter, solid stacks after.
The tallest stack is the family that bet on volume. Some of those children are your direct ancestors. The ones who didn't survive are the siblings of your bloodline — the near-misses of your existence.
Every person is a horizontal line from birth to death. Marriages merge two lines together. Children split them apart. The result looks like a transit map — tracks running parallel, converging at stations (marriages), diverging at junctions (births). The 1500s are sparse — lone tracks. By the 1800s it's a full system. Orphan nodes appear as disconnected segments floating in the right time period but touching nothing.
Find two tracks that converge and trace them backward. They were separate for generations — different countries, different surnames. Then they touch. Everyone downstream exists because of that moment.
People arranged on two axes of a grid. Relationships appear as colored cells at intersections. Families form diagonal bands. The result literally looks like a quilt — a patchwork of blocks where dense bands are large families and gaps are where branches ended or immigration broke the pattern.
Color by surname: the Browns (156 people) form the widest bands. Cadigan (122) and Murphy (80) create their own strong diagonals. Print it — it's a family artifact that looks like a domestic textile.
An hourglass with a person at the center. Above: every ancestor the research uncovered, fanning back through the generations. Below: their children, grandchildren, onward. The chosen person is the pinch point — everything inherited above, everything created below. Do this for George: 14 generations of research above him, the family he made below.
The upward fan is asymmetric — some branches deep, others ending after two generations in "unknown." The contrast between the researched past and the known present is the content.
A scatter plot where each dot is someone who outlived their partner. The horizontal axis is the year the spouse died. The vertical axis is how many years the survivor lived alone. Dots near the bottom: died within a year. Dots high up: thirty more years alone. Color by gender. Size by number of children.
The highest dots are three decades of absence. The lowest are genuine broken hearts. Every dot has two names — the one who died, and the one who was left.
Two vertical timelines running next to each other. Where the lives overlap in time, they share the same vertical space. Where one has died and the other hasn't been born yet, one column goes empty. Compare the earliest known ancestor (born ~1500, almost no records) with the most recently born (2019, everything documented). 500 years of separation. The asymmetry of documentation is the content.
For every marriage where both birthplaces are known, compute the distance between them. In the 1700s: 5 miles, 10 miles — married the neighbor. Then a dot explodes upward: someone married across an ocean. 3,000 miles. The scatter plot tells the story of the family's expanding world.
Every dot above 1,000 miles is an immigration story. Every dot near zero is a community story. The slope of the trend line = the rate at which the family's world expanded.
Flat for centuries, then exponential. Transportation, immigration, modernity — visible in the angle of that line.
325 marriages in the database. Each one is a fork where two separate family lines converged. Score each by "downstream impact" — how many living people exist because of this marriage. High-scoring fork points are the marriages that mattered most. One marriage in 1780 might have 200+ living descendants. Remove it and the tree collapses.
Color by the geographic distance between spouses' birthplaces. Blue = married locally. Red = continents apart. The thickest, reddest nodes are the most improbable, most consequential moments in the family's history.
Styled like actual census cards: names, ages, occupations, relationships to head of household. Browse family by family, decade by decade. Same household ten years later: children are taller, new ones appeared, eldest has left, grandparent gone. Flip between census years — 1850, 1860, 1870 — and watch a family age in decade-long jumps.
The gaps between snapshots are where life happened.
You at the center. Parents branch left and right. Their parents branch up and down. Each generation halves the segment length. The result is an H-Tree fractal — a self-similar pattern that is the family tree. 14 generations deep means the fractal recurses 14 times. Well-documented branches go deep. Poorly-documented lines terminate early. The asymmetry of the fractal is the asymmetry of the research.
This is a print piece. Generated as a high-resolution SVG, printed at poster size (24×36 inches or larger), and framed. Color-coded by surname. Each node labeled with a name and year. You have to lean in to read it. The act of leaning in is the act of researching.
| Phase | Pieces | What's Needed | Time |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Heartbeat Chart, Orphan Constellation, Name River, Sibling Stack | Nothing — data is ready | ~4 days |
| 2 | TimeNets, GeneaQuilts, Dual Tree, Widow's Window, Parallel Lives | Merge 602+ duplicate records | ~8 days |
| 3 | Marriage Distance, Fork Points | Map ~500 place names to coordinates | ~3 days |
| 4 | Census Moment | Clean residence/census event data | ~2 days |
| 5 | H-Tree (poster) | Print pipeline | ~2 days |
"The thread through all thirteen: they make the invisible structure of family visible. Time as topology. Distance as love story. Absence as presence. Contingency as the ground we stand on."
The plan also includes ideas for geographic visualizations — animated migration trails showing the family moving across the globe over 500 years, heat maps of ancestral homelands shifting continent to continent, and portrait maps placing faces on the earth where they were born.
There are sound pieces (each person as a note — pitch by birth year, duration by lifespan, the family played as a composition). 3D explorations: a root system growing downward into the earth, a galaxy where each ancestor is a star. A VR corridor you walk through, portraits on the walls giving way to silhouettes giving way to empty frames as you move deeper into the past.
And physical objects: an artist's book where each person gets a page (blank pages for unknowns), a password-protected family website for sharing at reunions, and the possibility of making ceramic covers for the book at NCECA.
The thirteen pieces are the core. Everything else is where the project can grow.
All data from George Lack's genealogy research.
Built by Ryan Lack, February 2026.
Everything runs on a single database. No cloud. No accounts. Just a web page you can open.