I find myself keeping track of a family lineage and try to manage the breeding lines. I typically start with common names for my villagers and then start sub-tribes with names to keep track of the mother/father for each child born. I think a family tree would be interesting.

That would be cool! I have tried to do that but got messed up in it when I turned it off and came back to find I had left 3 of women in breeding mode! They had like 4 kids a piece and I have no idea who the daddys are! lol

sounds like they need a visit from jerry springer

I agree they should definately have family trees

i lost so many kids .. not knowing who belongs to who

I tracked by mothers, when it got to 13 to 14 preggers at a time I gave up.

One thing I've seemed to notice. If the women are the ones that are breeders they all go after the oldest male...if that helps any of you out.

^.".^

Okay, here's what I'm trying in my new game. My 6 adults are Dick & Jane, Bob & Carol, Ted & Alice. The young one I named after my maiden great-aunt Nora and I'm going to try and leave her childless to see if she lives longer. Each couple has had one baby and I added the parents initials to the child's name to tell who's who. I'm planning to have each woman have 3 babies - 1 by each of the men - to minimize inbreeding - just like the Benleuti & the clones on StarTrek Next Gen.
I've even gone so far as to download free family tree software from Legacy - how pathetic am I? I'll let you know how my "planned community" works out.

Dar

I kind of like to keep up with who's whose with mine too and tho it's difficult to keep up with the dads, I have managed to keep up with what child belongs to what mother this way...

I basically am running a Twin Peaks village. Everyone in the village gets renamed with the name of a character from Twin Peaks, and when children are born, I give the child a name that's either from that family on Twin Peaks or somehow related. i.e., the famous Laura Palmer on the show was the daughter of Leland and Sarah... so naturally the first girl born to my villagers named Leland and Sarah got renamed Laura.

I'm more relating it to the mothers since there are so many different combinations of dads on my island, but sometimes still an "appropriate" pair per Twin Peaks gets together.

After several kids, when I started running out of family names I would just pick something somewhat related to those characters - such as should Leland and Sarah have a boy next time, I'll just name it Bobby (Laura's boyfriend on the show).

It's working for me to keep up with the moms & kids and who's basically related, though now at 26 villagers I have sort of lost track of who the dads are most of the time (although Leland is impregnating the entire village lately so that's easy, heh!).

And you could certainly use this with many different shows or movies even, tho probably best to choose a set of characters from a TV show or movie that has lots of characters and lots of families to choose from. Soap operas would probably work really well with this method!