Today I Learned …

In the Middle Ages, the scions of old families wanted a way to keep their family histories straight. Prominent families hired artists to create visual propaganda of these unbroken lines of hereditary descent. The artists decided that the easiest way to depict a family’s history would be to paint a simple tree. They put the founder of a lineage at the base of the tree, and painted his descendants on the branches. The French gave these pictures a name that reflected their forking shape: pe de grue, or “crane’s foot”. In English, the word became pedigree.