1920s Pedigree Charts

These charts were collected by CGS in the 1920s and bound into two volumes. Very few provide any source citations and authorship on some is unclear. At some point CGS volunteers made an index on index cards that were kept in a card file in the library for many years to make the information in the charts more available.

In 2020 volunteer Ron Madson photographed every chart (they’re a bit too big for most scanners). He made this video of the process. Meanwhile other volunteers transcribed the index cards into computer spreadsheets and transformed them into this set of PDF indexes.

The chart images: Each chart consists at least of a pedigree chart, handwritten or typed onto a form, with the subject’s paternal ancestry on the left page and maternal ancestry on the right one. Some charts have more than one image either because additional information was written on the other side of the paper or because there is additional material attached to the chart. In those cases the chart file will be a multi-page document. When material is written on the other side of the paper it is presented in the order in which one would find it in the book: The back of the left side, the double-page image, and the back of the right side. In those cases where successive charts in the book have material on the back side the double page image has been split to avoid confusion about what page belongs to the chart at hand.

Most of the charts are labelled with the name of the person whose parents’ ancestries are documented. The surname used for indexing is in caps; for a married woman that will be her father’s surname followed by her husband’s surname in title-case. For a few charts we weren’t able to determine the full name of the base person; in those cases we’ve named the chart link with only the father’s surname. A few members submitted updated charts over time. Those charts are not bound together and not all of them are indexed.

Most index entries have two names, a primary and a spouse. Note that the primary names are Surname, Given Name and the spouse names are Given Name, Surname. Each entry has a clickable link to the chart image. The entries are sorted alphabetically by the primary name, first by surname and then by given name.