Jamie Allen built the kind of genealogy website that eventually stops looking like a family tree and starts looking like somebody tried to hyperlink civilization.
The site calls itself Jamie’s Family Tree & Ancient Genealogical Allegations, and the second half of that title is important. FabPedigree currently reports 296,896 individual pedigree pages, along with thousands of alternate pedigrees, missing-generation markers, abstractions, spouses, children, and other records connected through an enormous web of links.
The index wanders far beyond one family. It includes royalty, saints, popes, U.S. presidents, Mayflower passengers, founding fathers, legendary figures, gods, and other people or entities that appear in historical or traditional genealogies.
This could become dangerous nonsense very quickly if the site pretended all of those connections were equally reliable.
It does not.
Near the top of the homepage, Allen tells readers not to treat the genealogy as authoritative and to use it as a source of hints before checking more reputable genealogical sources. There is an errata page, source material, explanations of the pedigree format, and years of site-news entries describing corrections and expansions.
That warning may be the most responsible sentence on the site.
The scale became part of the project
FabPedigree’s newsletter shows how the database grew from a hobby into something slightly ridiculous.
Allen recalls having about 7,000 names and wondering what he had done. Later there were roughly 75,000. By Version 102 the site had reached nearly 297,000 pedigree pages. Updates still add famous people, obscure connectors between lineages, corrections, and occasionally non-human entries used in the site’s broader ancestry structures.
This is old-web database design in its purest form: lots of small pages, lots of direct links, and an index that assumes the reader is willing to wander.
That architecture suits genealogy surprisingly well. A family tree is not really a document. It is a graph. Hypertext lets a reader move from one person to parents, spouses, descendants, alternate claims, and source notes without pretending there is one natural reading order.
The drawback is also obvious. Once legendary and ancient genealogies enter the graph, a hyperlink can make a weak claim look just as solid as a documented one. FabPedigree’s own caveats are therefore not decorative. They are part of how the site should be used.
For researchers, the value is exploratory rather than evidentiary: find a possible connection, note the claim, then verify it elsewhere. For web historians, the site is a spectacular example of one person turning a personal research obsession into a public linked database large enough to require its own statistics.
CacheRat’s 1,967 Ancient Web Domains research list keeps finding projects like this because the independent web was very good at giving one person’s enormous side project somewhere to live.
Nearly 300,000 pages later, this one is still growing.