Network diagram illustrating Friends-Associates-Neighbors connections among kin and community

Beyond Blood: FAN and the Future of Family History

Genealogy gives us tools to understand the dead, but those tools often favor blood and law over the relationships people actually lived: godparents, neighbors, mentors, and chosen family.

The FAN principle (Friends, Associates, Neighbors) was a breakthrough. Widening the lens from pedigree to community helped genealogists solve identities that once seemed impossible.

FAN also exposes the limits of current systems. Social and chosen ties usually appear only as clues in the search for legal or biological kin, rather than as relationships worth recording in their own right. Family-history software has room to grow here.

From pedigrees to communities

For much of its history, genealogy relied on consanguineal kin (blood) and affinal kin (marriage). Records of births, marriages, and deaths formed the backbone. If those failed, the trail often went cold.

The FAN approach, named and popularized by Elizabeth Shown Mills, widened the circle. When direct evidence is missing, study the cluster: neighbors, associates, and witnesses. People appear together on census pages, in pew rolls, in land transactions, on militia rosters. The cluster often gives you valuable insight into who your subject really was.1

Marsha Hoffman Rising demonstrated FAN’s value in Opening the Ozarks, tracing thousands of settlers through community context rather than pedigrees alone. Her project showed how communities can reveal identities that lineages alone cannot.23

Naming more kinds of kin

To make sense of what FAN reveals, we need the right vocabulary. Anthropology describes forms of kinship beyond blood and law:

  • Consanguineal kin: related by descent, such as parents, children, and siblings.4
  • Affinal kin: related by marriage, such as spouses and in-laws.5
  • Ritual or spiritual kinship: created by rite or office, such as compadrazgo (godparenthood).67
  • Chosen or social kin (sometimes called “fictive” kin): enduring ties forged by care and obligation, including queer “chosen families” and honorary aunts and uncles.8

If our words for kin are broader, our software ought to be too.

Why the tools lag behind

Some genealogy programs have tried to reflect FAN’s insights:

  • RootsMagic 9 “Associations” lets you record associates, but analysis is thin.9
  • Family Historian allows “witnesses/shared events” and can attach non-principal participants, though its model remains centered on events.10
  • Clooz “Composite View” visualizes people-document networks, but stops short of durable, typed relationships.11

These features are useful, but they highlight the gap. Researchers want to record networks, and the software only partially supports them.

A “two-hop network” captures friend-of-a-friend connections. In a “role-rich model,” a person can appear as a witness, executor, juror, or pew neighbor as well as a spouse or child. Genealogists already trace these connections by hand, but their tools seldom treat them as central.

Seeing care as part of family history

Christine Sleeter’s work on critical family history reminds us that families live inside structures of race, class, gender, and colonization.8 Those forces shaped whose ties were documented and whose were erased.

Queer chosen families, ritual godparent ties, and neighbor care networks are often missing from the official record, even though they structured real lives. Software that cannot model them risks reproducing those silences.

Walking through the door FAN opened

FAN showed how communities solve genealogical puzzles. Critical family history adds that so-called fictive kin may be central to a person’s identity. The next generation of genealogy tools should preserve all of these relationships as first-class data. FAN opened the door. To tell fuller histories, our models and tools need to walk through it.

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Footnotes

  1. Elizabeth Shown Mills, “QuickLesson 11: Identity Problems & the FAN Principle,” Evidence Explained. https://www.evidenceexplained.com/content/quicklesson-11-identity-problems-fan-principle ↩

  2. Marsha Hoffman Rising, Opening the Ozarks: First Families in Southwest Missouri, 1835-1839 (Derry, NH: American Society of Genealogists, 2005), 4 vols. Project overview: https://www.marsharising.com/Opening%20the%20Ozarks/First%20Families%20of%20SW%20MO.htm ↩

  3. FamilySearch Catalog, “Opening the Ozarks,” confirming publication details and extent. https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/catalog/1326260 ↩

  4. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Consanguinity.” https://www.britannica.com/summary/consanguinity ↩

  5. Encyclopaedia Britannica, “Affinity (kinship).” https://www.britannica.com/topic/affinity-kinship ↩

  6. Oxford Reference, “Compadrazgo.” https://www.oxfordreference.com/display/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095628441 ↩

  7. Roland Armando Alum, “The Continuing Relevance of Compadrazgo: Spiritual Kinship in Latin America,” Anthropology News, Jan 3, 2024. https://www.anthropology-news.org/articles/the-continuing-relevance-of-compadrazgo-spiritual-kinship-in-latin-america/ ↩

  8. Christine Sleeter, “Critical Family History: An Introduction,” Genealogy 4, no. 2 (2020). https://www.mdpi.com/2313-5778/4/2/64 ↩ ↩2

  9. RootsMagic Team, “Exploring the New ‘Associations’ Feature in RootsMagic 9,” RootsMagic Blog, Jul 20, 2023. https://blog.rootsmagic.com/?p=3687 ↩

  10. Family Historian, “Witnesses (Shared Events),” Help, v7. https://www.family-historian.co.uk/help/fh7/witnesses.html ↩

  11. Clooz, “A Unique Analysis Tool: Composite View.” https://clooz.com/composite-view/ ↩