The Rothschild family tree

The tree reads downwards, oldest generation at the top. It runs both ways from Nathan Mayer Rothschild (1777–1836), who founded the London house. Upwards: his parents Mayer Amschel Rothschild (1743/44–1812) and Gutle Schnapper (1753–1849), their parents Amschel Moses Rothschild, Schönche Lechnich and Wolf Salomon Schnapper, and the great-grandparents Moses Kalman Rothschild (d. 1735) and Schönche Buchsbaum. Downwards: his seven children and their children, the generation that lived through 1933.

Every edge below is one authored parents assertion in data/curated/people.json, carrying its own source, so the tree and the pages cannot disagree. The row of boxes at the top also shows where the record stops. Gutle’s mother is unnamed in the sources and no parent of Moses Kalman is recorded; the family’s name can be traced further back, to the house zum roten Schild and to Isaak Elchanan Bacharach (d. 1585), but no chain of parents links him to Moses Kalman. The tree stops at the great-grandparents rather than guess. Spouses are drawn where they are the other parent of a curated child; the rest are named in the descriptions.

The drawing is wider than most screens, and its boxes stay readable rather than shrink to fit. /js/tree.js opens it centred on Nathan, lets a pointer drag it like a map, and adds a toolbar above it — −, the current scale, + and Reset — that scales the whole canvas between 40% and 250%; Ctrl or ⌘ with the wheel, which is what a trackpad pinch sends, zooms around the pointer. Scaling never re-lays-out the drawing, so a box stays where the exporter put it. The page is complete without the script, just unscaled and starting from its left edge.

Each box opens that person’s page, and every member of the family on it carries the events they actually lived through. Two kinds of link, kept apart in the data: rows whose role is the biography’s own claim — Nathan as subsidy financier, Lionel admitted to the Commons, Ferdinand building Waddesdon — and rows marked resident, which say only that the person was in that city while that event happened, never that they had any part in it. Inferred rows start at the age of ten and stop at the year the person left; nothing is added to round a count up, so the number of links runs from five, for a granddaughter who died at twenty-seven, to twelve for Nathan himself — Charlotte, who died in 1859, has fewer than her nephew, who lived to see the First World War.