A kinship chart is not a family photograph — it is a piece of notation, invented so that societies organised in wildly different ways could be laid side by side and compared. W. H. R. Rivers worked out the genealogical method on the Torres Strait expedition of 1898 and set it out in Kinship and Social Organisation (1914): ask everyone the same short list of questions about their relatives, write the answers in the same handful of shapes, and suddenly two communities on opposite sides of the world can be read against each other. The shapes are few and the rules are strict. Learn them here, then trace your way around a four-generation genealogy and watch how a single chart holds positions that different societies name in completely different ways.