Genealogy
Pre-modern genealogy

Hereditary emperors, kings and chiefs in several areas have long claimed descent from gods (thus establishing divine legitimacy). Court genealogists have preserved or invented appropriate genealogical pretensions - for example) in Japan, Polynesia, and the Indo-European world from Scandinavia through ancient Greece to India.

Historically, in Western societies, genealogy focused on the kinship and descent of rulers and nobles, often arguing or demonstrating the legitimacy of claims to wealth and power. Genealogy often overlapped with heraldry, which reflected the ancestry of noble houses in their coats of arms. Modern scholars regard many claimed noble ancestries as fabrications, such as the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle 's tracing of the ancestry of several English kings to the god Woden. With the coming of Christianity to northern Europe, Anglo-Saxon royal genealogies extended the kings' lines of ancestry from Woden back to reach the line of Biblical patriarchs: Noah and Adam. (This extension offered the side-benefit of connecting pretentious rulers with the prestigious genealogy of Jesus.)

Modern historians and genealogists may regard manufactured pseudo-genealogies with a degree of scepticism. However, the desire to find ancestral links with prominent figures from a legendary or distant past has persisted. In the United States, for example, it does no harm to establish one's links to ancestors who boarded the Mayflower. And the popularity of the genealogical hypothesis of The Holy Blood and the Holy Grail (1982) demonstrates popular interest in ancient bloodlines, however dubious.

Some family trees have been maintained for considerable periods. The family tree of Confucius has been maintained for over 2,500 years and is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records as the largest extant family tree. The fifth edition of the Confucius Genealogy was printed in 2009 by the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee (CGCC).
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