Game Of The Thrones Family Tree

Building a Game Of The Thrones Family Tree That Doesn't Drive You Insane

I spent about six hours last weekend reconstructing the Stark and Lannister branches of the Game Of The Thrones Family Tree for a project, and honestly, the books and show don't agree on some of the connections. That alone is enough to make anyone reconsider their life choices. The obvious answer is wiki sites, but most people don't realize that different wikis use different source priorities. The A Wiki of Ice and Fire is closer to the book canon, while Game of Thrones Wiki sometimes blends show-only characters into trees where they don't belong. I got burned on this when I pulled Tyene Sand's parentage from the wrong source and spent twenty minutes trying to reconcile why she wasn't in the correct branch. For the cleanest tree, I start with the book canon and cross-reference with the show where I need to fill gaps for viewers who only watched the series. The book genealogy is deeper but also messier because George R.R. Martin never finished cleaning up all the connections in A Dance with Dragons.

The actual structure most people get wrong

Everyone tries to build a linear tree going top-down from Aegon the Conqueror. That approach falls apart around the second generation because House Targaryen practicing sibling marriage created loops that break traditional tree visualization tools. I learned this the hard way when I tried importing the Targaryen line into a standard org chart generator and it just crashed on the recursive parent-child relationships. The workaround is treating it as a directed graph instead of a hierarchy. Nodes represent people. Edges represent parent-child or marriage connections. When you hit a loop like Aegon II and Jaehaera being both parent and child to each other through adoption clauses, you just flag that node and move on. The tool doesn't care about the semantic paradox as long as the edge list is accurate.

A practical method that actually works

Here's what I end up doing every time. First, I list out all the major houses in a spreadsheet with columns for character name, house, parents, spouse, and children. The spreadsheet step feels tedious but it's essential because the visual tools are terrible at handling the sheer volume of bastard branches in Game of Thrones. There are more known bastards than legitimate heirs in several houses and trying to type those into a diagram tool directly is a mistake. After the spreadsheet, I use something like yEd or draw.io to convert it into a proper visual tree. I set the layout to hierarchical with left-to-right orientation because the data flows better that way. Top-down makes the Dothraki and Night's Watch connections look completely broken since those branches go sideways and backwards across multiple generations. For house colors and sigils, I pull from official reference images rather than guessing. I've seen too many fan-made trees get flagged for using the wrong crown color on House Targaryen or the direwolf orientation wrong on House Stark. These details matter if anyone browsing the tree knows the source material.

Edge cases that will waste your afternoon

The Jon Snow problem is the big one. He's presented as Ned Stark's nephew but is actually the son of Rhaegar Targaryen and Lyanna Stark. Any family tree that shows him as Ned's biological son is wrong, and any that shows him as a pure Stark heir is also wrong. I resolved this by adding a dashed connector from Rhaegar and Lyanna to Jon, keeping the solid connector to Ned's household for the foster relationship, and adding a small annotation that clarifies the discrepancy between what the characters believed and what the reader knows. Another issue is the Ironborn succession lines. House Greyjoy has so many marriages and divorces across branches that a single tree can't contain it all. I had to split the line into two diagrams, one for the pre-Robert's Rebellion era and one for the current generation, otherwise the page became unreadable at any reasonable screen size. The Dornish houses are also a pain point. Martell succession doesn't follow primogeniture the way the rest of Westeros does, and several key characters like Oberyn and Elia have complicated connections to the main line that casual trees often omit. If you skip them, anyone from Dorne who reads the tree will notice immediately.

What most tutorials don't tell you

Building this tree will expose how much of the lineage is intentionally obscured by the story. Martin designed the genealogy to be partially unknowable, so you will hit dead ends. Some characters have no recorded parents beyond what a single passage mentions. The Best market approach is to mark uncertain connections with a question mark and cite your source in the notes field. You should also plan for scale upfront. If you include every named character, the final tree will contain roughly four to five hundred nodes. That's too many for most diagram tools to render cleanly. I recommend creating a master tree and then filtering views by house or region. The master file is your source of truth, and the filtered views are what you share with people who don't want to stare at five hundred dots on a screen.

Download and further reference

I keep a personal copy of the full tree exported as an SVG along with the source spreadsheet. The spreadsheet contains about three times as much detail as the visual tree, including alternate name spellings and disputed parentage notes. You can find community versions on GitHub under various repositories, though quality varies widely. I'd suggest checking the commit history and comparing against primary sources before using any downloaded tree in anything formal. The core takeaway is that the Game Of The Thrones Family Tree is less a straightforward diagram and more a research project disguised as a chart. Treat it that way and you'll save yourself a lot of rework.