Try it! (Warning — it will require good intuition about kinship charts and, even with that, seems to be fairly difficult. However it is a pure logic puzzle: besides the explicit Clues, you’ll need only the definitions and most obvious facts about kinship.)
Zelophehad the genealogist was drawing a family tree for Nathan Sourmash, but a disk-crash destroyed most of his work. All he’s recovered are twelve names, and some tidbits of information linking them. From these clues, draw a family tree depicting each of the 12 person’s exact relationship to Nathan.
Clue 1: The 12 people include five women (Sabina, Tamar, Ursule, Valpurge, and Wilmot). Their husbands were Aella, Benno, Cadelon, Donogh and Gregor, in some order.
Clue 2: The 12 people include seven men (five just mentioned, and Ephraim and Fjolnar). Each had children only by a single lawful wife. Each of these seven wives had children only by a single lawful husband who was not her own father, brother, son or nephew.
Clue 3: Three of the men did not have any brothers. Aella was Donogh’s brother. Gregor was the brother of the seventh man. (These are full-brothers, not half-brothers.)
Clue 4: Fjolnar had at least one granddaughter in the set, but neither Sabina nor Wilmot is descended from Fjolnar.
Clue 5: Ephraim had no daughters. His grandchildren included at least three of the 12 people.
Clue 6: The set of 12 includes both parents of Nathan, all of his grandparents, and all of his great-grandparents. The set includes exactly three of Nathan’s great-great grandparents.
Clue 7: Valpurge was Tamar’s mother and Wilmot’s daughter. Donogh was Benno’s uncle.
Here is the solution. It is encouraged to solve this by yourself.
© Copyright 2005 by James D. Allen