The Web of Blood: Why Your Family Tree
Doesn’t Follow the Rules

The Web of Blood: Why Your Family Tree Doesn’t Follow the Rules

The image of a family tree has become so familiar, we rarely question it. A solid trunk rises from the ground, with clean branches splitting off at regular intervals, each name carefully placed, each connection leading predictably to the next. It’s a neat metaphor. It makes the past feel organized and linear, as though our lives today are the result of a single continuous stream flowing steadily through time.

But if you’ve ever traced a real lineage, especially beyond a few generations, you already know that the tidy tree is a myth. Real family history does not resemble a tree at all. It’s more like a dense and chaotic tangle, a "Family Bush", or more precisely, how I tend to view it as a "web of blood". And unlike the tree, this web refuses to stay symmetrical. It doubles back on itself. It tangles. It breaks and rejoins. It disappears into gaps in the record, only to reemerge somewhere unexpected. It isn’t clean, but it is accurate.

One of the most misleading ideas in popular genealogy is the assumption that each generation naturally “doubles” in ancestors: two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. By the tenth generation, you would expect to have over a thousand distinct forebears. But in most cases, that’s not what the records show. Instead, the same names start to appear more than once in different branches of the tree. This is known as pedigree collapse, and it’s not rare or strange, it’s the rule. For most of history, people lived in small, relatively closed communities. Intermarriage between cousins was not only common, but sometimes expected. Families preserved land, property, alliances, and cultural continuity by marrying within the group. In some cases, they had little choice.

These loops and overlaps are not mistakes. They are living proof of how human societies actually functioned. They show us how bloodlines carried forward, how cultural identity was preserved, and how survival often depended on maintaining internal bonds. The Web of Blood is not just biological, it is historical. It reflects real conditions: geographic isolation, tribal structure, religious tradition, and the human impulse to hold tight to what is known.

And then there are the breaks, the places where a branch disappears entirely. Sometimes these are the result of war, famine, forced migration, or lost records. Other times, they’re intentional: a name was changed to hide from authorities or to distance oneself from a painful past. In some families, entire generations are untraceable because they weren’t documented in official records. They lived outside the system. They didn’t leave clean paper trails. That doesn’t mean they didn’t matter. It just means we have to look harder.

Modern genealogy tools aren’t always equipped to deal with this complexity. Most software still wants a mother, a father, a date of birth, and a country of origin. It asks for clarity where clarity may not exist. It doesn’t always know what to do with the unofficial adoption, the step-parent who raised the child, or the family secret whispered across generations. But the reality is: some of the most important people in a lineage are not defined by genetics. They are defined by influence, by care, by presence. They may not share DNA with the person they raised, but they shaped the outcome just as much.

These non-genetic ancestors, those who stepped in, stepped up, or simply stayed when others did not, are part of the web too. Whether formally recorded or not, their role in a family’s survival and memory is undeniable. The history of a family cannot be reduced to blood alone. It includes the people who showed up, the people who protected, the people who passed on stories, songs, and languages. It includes those whose names are still spoken, even if no one remembers exactly where they came from.

Doing this kind of research is not for the faint of heart. It requires patience, skepticism, and sometimes a willingness to sit with silence. There are days when the records don’t cooperate. Names are spelled five different ways. Census takers wrote down the wrong information, or didn’t write anything at all. A child is listed one year and gone the next, with no explanation. Death certificates don’t always tell the truth. Immigration forms can’t always be trusted. And then there are the oral histories, sometimes vivid, sometimes contradictory. Sorting it out takes work. But if you keep going, patterns begin to emerge. The Web of Blood starts to reveal its shape.

This is the kind of work I do, and the kind of work I care about. I’m not here to build fairy-tale trees or reinforce family legends that were never true to begin with. I am here to trace the real paths, complicated, broken, sometimes painful, but always revealing. Genealogy is not about perfection. It is about reality. It is about honoring those who endured, even when the records forgot them.

So if your family tree doesn’t follow the rules, that’s not a failure. That’s your beginning. That’s the moment you stop looking for symmetry and start looking for truth.

Ian Gubbenet
Genealogist & Researcher
Genera Genealogical Services (GGS)