Friday, April 1, 2016

Handling BC Dates in a Family Tree Viewer

I came across a reddit thread where someone mentioned that there was a lot of inbreeding in Cleopatra's family tree. I had never known that, and after learning some more I decided that this would be a nice sample to include with the Family Tree visualization, available at https://learnforeverlearn.com/ancestors.

Cleopatra VII's Family Tree

Here, by "Cleopatra" I mean Cleopatra VII. During the Ptolemaic dynasty, it was common that the queens were named Cleopatra and the kings were "Ptolemy". It was also common for brothers and sisters to marry each other.

All of the dates for her family tree are BC, and I needed to update the tree viewer to handle this.