Ask HN: What are some good ways to create a complex family tree?
As a family side project I'm trying to recreate my families' (maternal and paternal) trees into one big giant picture.
Currently I'm drawing a diagram in draw.io/diagrams.net, but it gets messy, it requires alot of manual interventions of placing nodes as they come to my attention, it's hard to add information and possibly graphics depending on edge cases (e.g. cohabits but no children, multiple marriages/children with different fathers...) and make it all look nice and pretty.
I've searched HN and found one or two nice applications that do seem nice, but really doesn't seem to handle the complexity I'm trying to deal with.
At this point, I'm considering using some kind of graph database and just let everything order itself out nice and evenly, but I have little experience with graph databases and don't know what my options are in terms of adding information and possibly attaching images (person photo) to various nodes and make it nice and tidy and printable.
As a side note I'm considering skipping the whole diagram thing and just use a well-linked mediawiki or something instead with templates for family members parents/children/siblings along with other info. This approach seems pretty good, but judging by the fact that I'm the only one in my family doing this and knowing wiki markup and stuff, I'd imagine this would be a daunting task as well.
Have anyone else done visually appealing family trees before with great complexity? I'd like to have fields/information as DOB, DOD, given names, surname and eventual past surnames, and relationships (child of / parent of, married to, cohabited with, one night standed with causing a child.....).
Roughly I'm at 110 nodes/persons at the moment, spanning over eight or nine generations [0], and adding information, nodes and stuff in draw.io just doesn't seem convenient or easy enough for what I one day hope to be a 'finished product', i.e. a nice and intuitive image I can print out on anything between A2-A3 page size and distribute to family members.
Surely someone on HN has done something like this before? What are the pitfalls (e.g. should I skip both maternal and paternal linage and concentrate on one side of the family)? Are there any obvious solutions I'm missing? Am I right to take the approach of doing a diagram for visual / esthetic reasons, or would the use of say a mediawiki/wiki instance outweigh the visual niceness, allowing other information (anecdotes, family members' reminiscence of dead relatives etc.) maybe make it a better choice? Or is there something else completely?
[0] https://i.imgur.com/RecRPDy.png Note: Unfinished image. Bottom colored lines are ordered into decades by year born, white white backgrounds are nodes missing information.