One thing I have noticed is the interest in the genealogy of the Mayfair Witches. So, I have been making some preparations to go into the subject on a deeper level.
There has been a great deal more interest in genealogy in recent years, and I think that is largely due to the use of genetic genealogy and what it can do. So, I've begun by adding a new page to the site, a Mayfair Family Tree Tutorial, I guess I can call it. So far, I have found some charts that most start with. They give the average percentage of genes inherited down the generations of the direct line, and the amount of shared DNA (on average) that can potentially be found in cousins by generation.
Different DNA testing kits have different thresholds, so the second chart I found, which is from an online article in Family Tree Magazine (there is a link provided), shows those averages by testing kit.
Now, I wish this had turned out better than it did, but I did manage to make a transparent image of the family tree by Katherine Ramsland that appears in The Witches' Companion. The trees I've shown before are only sections of the Mayfair tree. This tree is where they all come from, and will be handy if we were to, say, apply averages using the charts.
There are pages on the site that also might help to give a better idea of what's going on when it comes to the genetics of the Mayfair Witches. When we look at this data for ourselves, the charts are typically referring to only one line of descent from an ancestor.
It's when you start to identify more than one distinct line of descent from the same ancestor that things get...interesting.
I'm also trying to provide some basic information on genealogy that people might have anyway. If we start with the basics, the genetic picture, mind boggling as it already is, might become more clear.
Please note that some of the things that I will discuss are sensitive in nature, and might possibly be upsetting for some. So I will try to be as careful as I can when discussing those things.
I anticipate that to illustrate real life examples as much as I am able, I will be using branches of my own family tree. How much information I provide about the people on it will depend upon several factors. The first is living or dead. The second is how close the person is to me in terms of time and generation. Beyond that, other things that will influence the amount of information I share will be whether or not that information is relevant in some way to current events and/or living people, and if the person was well known in life and/or after death.
Hopefully, what it will amount to is a better understanding of the Mayfair genealogy that plays such a role in the lives of the characters and the events in the novels...