Family Tree Data Visualization

For this project, I wanted to think outside the box of the "traditional" family tree. I was frustrated with not being able to read this model chronologically.

Despite my frustration with the "idea" for this model, I realized belatedly I should have started with this type of visualization anyway. Keeping track of my cast of characters has been tricky, and I wish I'd had at least this simple picture to help me along.

This format, while intially not what I was looking for, turned out to - in the long run - best suit my immediate needs. The biggest problem with it was that I didn't do it on my own, but with the help of Jeremy, modified from another project he was working on. He created it using vis.js Timelines, which pulls data from Google Sheets.

I'd had such high hopes for this bubble-format family tree! It ended up being much more challenging to excecute than expected. Whenever I thought about how I wanted it to function it seemed so clear, but grasping how to make that happen was elusive.

This version I created in Tableau, using spreadsheets that I exported from FileMaker. The size of the bubbles is the individual's "age at death" as a number-based (if arbitrary) marker.

This clearly still needs more work, but it was a really interesting problem to wrestle with.