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Activity 3: Kinship Chart

In your last few lectures, you’ve seen several examples of kinship charts. These are used to describe lineages, sort of like family trees. For this activity, you will create a kinship chart for a famous or fictional family. First, read the information below describing the symbols and format of kinship charts. The instructions for your activity are at the bottom of the document.

People

	Use a circle for a woman/girl.
	Use a triangle for a man/boy.
	Use a square for the ego: the individual around whom the chart is oriented.
	Place a line through the appropriate symbol if the individual is deceased.

Descent

	Use a solid line, straight down from the marriage or cohabitation symbol, to indicate biological descent.
	Use a dotted line to indicate adoptive descent.
	If you don’t know the parents of an individual, indicate common descent between brothers and sisters by drawing a bar above the symbols.

Marriage and cohabitation

	Use an equal sign between two individuals to indicate a marriage.
	Use an approximately equal sign (≈) to indicate a cohabiting couple who are not married.
	Use a similar sign ( ̴) to symbolize parents who are neither cohabiting nor married.
	Use a not equal sign (≠) if a marriage ended in divorce.
	If the individual has been married twice, use equal signs on both sides of the symbol, with the first spouse on the left.
	If the individual has been married more than twice, draw lines connecting the spouses below the symbols.

Symbols source: lucidchart.com

Once you’ve got the symbols down, it’s simple to create your kinship chart.

1. Add Ego to the center of your page.

Designate one individual, identified as Ego, as the starting point of your diagram. As described above, the Ego is symbolized as a square.

2. Add Ego’s kin.

Using the kinship chart symbols above, add the relationships that you’d like to visualize. Record Ego’s parents and ancestors above Ego, Ego’s siblings at the same level as Ego, and Ego’s children and descendants below Ego.

3. Adjust for unusual circumstances.

You will likely need to represent a relationship or individual that is not standardized (example: a group marriage or a nonbinary individual). In this case, anthropologists create their own symbols or use colors or other markers to depict kinship as accurately as possible. The purpose of the chart also impacts how symbols are chosen (example: representing social relationships or representing genetic heredity). For this exercise, represent transgender individuals by gender, not sex. When using unique symbols, it is especially important to include a key for the reader.

Your Activity:

Create a kinship chart for a famous, historical, or fictional family (do not use your own family). This can be anyone from the Osbournes to House Stark from Game of Thrones. Your chart should include:

1. A central Ego, labeled

2. At least three generations

3. At least ten individuals, labeled

4. A key defining the chart’s symbols

You can create your chart using a computer program or draw it on paper and take a picture to submit. You do not need to include this document in your submission, but make sure it is in a readable format.