AHNENTAFEL
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German origin -- Ahnen (ancestor) tafel (table).  We are most familiar 
with seeing charts of our ancestors in a fan form with us at the bottom 
middle and then our ancestors branching out above and to the left and 
right.  On those charts your ancestors are numbered.  For example you 
are usually number 1, your father is 2, your mother 3, your frather's 
father is 4 - his wife 5, your mother's father is 6 - his wife 7 and so 
on as far as you can go.

  The ahnentafel takes that same information and instead of showing it 
in a fan chart way it simply lists the ancestors in numerical order. 
So the fan chart I described above would look like this in an 
ahnentafel.

  1. Me
  2. My father
  3. My mother
  4. My father's father
  5. My father's father's wife
  6. My mother's father
  7. My mother's father's wife

The first type of representation (the fan chart) looks nice and is a 
joy to complete.  But it isn't very useful to computers or easy to 
reproduce.  If I take my fan chart and convert it to an ahnentafel then 
I can easyily type the information on a typewriter and send it to a 
publication or another person and even some computer programs would be 
able to read it.

  A variation of this is the "tiny tafel" we talk about.  In your fan 
chart you may go back 6 generations for one surname.  Your earliest 
information starts say in 1765 and it ends in 1987 with information on 
the a present descendant.  If I want to see if I connect with your line 
in some way the most important piece of information is the surname 
followed by the dates of events, followed by geographic location.  I 
don't really need the details of everyone in those 6 generations to do 
a quick check for a connection.  If you were to tell me - " I have 
information on the Bonner surname from 1766 to 1987 starting in 
Pennsylvania and ending in California"  That would be sufficient for me 
to initially decide we might connect.  That is the philosophy of the 
"tiny tafel".  It is a condensed version of the ahnentafel.

  The fan chart is a graphic representation of ancestry.

  The ahnentafel is a tabular representation of the same information.
  The tiny tafel is a summary of ahnentafel information.

The neat thing about tiny tafels is that we have software to gather 
them together, index them, and allow people to call up and search them 
online.  You can get a great deal of information across in in tinytafel 
that is why we are pushing them on the NGC.  Hope I didn't run on too 
much on this.

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