The Watts · Porter blood line of Dallin Thomas Watts
Cut through a tree and every year it lived is there as a ring. This is that cut, made through a family. Dallin sits at the heart; each ring is a century. Every thread runs from a parent to a child. Where a thread runs long, that generation was slow to arrive. Where the rings go empty, the records stop.
Watts ancestors fill the left half of the circle and Porter ancestors the right. Each ancestor sits at the year they were born, not at their generation number. Switch to Generation rings to see where the two measures disagree. The names around the rim are the family lines. The outer band shows the four grandparents, and the inner band the sixteen great-great-grandparents, each set where its branch spreads out. Hover a name to light up that line. Hover a thread to trace it home, and click to open that person's record.
Each person here was alive on the day the next one was born, going by the tree's dates. Stories, voices and habits could pass hand to hand across each overlap. Choose a year to see how few lifetimes it takes to reach it. Living at the same time doesn't prove two people met, and the badges show how well each person is documented.
Press play to watch six centuries run forward. The camera follows the living family: tight on England at first, pulling back as lines spread across Europe and then across the ocean, and settling on Utah at the end. It pulls back a moment before each jump to a new land, so you see it happen. Each arc joins a parent's birthplace to a child's. Ancestors light up while they are alive and dim to embers at their resting place. At the end every road meets in Cache Valley, 1985. Resting places is the burial map: one point per person, from the burial record if there is one, otherwise the death place.
Ancestors whose lives are written up outside the family: Mayflower passengers and figures with their own encyclopedia entries. Each person's identity matches the historical record. The chain of parents linking them to Dallin is the family tree as shown, not a proven line, so treat each descent as a lead to confirm.
Service confirmed by a named record: a muster roll, pension, draft card or enlistment. Solid badges mean the record matches the person. The chain of parents down to Dallin is still the tree as shown.
Leads are record matches that aren't confirmed yet. Tree claims are service written on a FamilySearch profile with no record found. Medieval service is real history, but the descent to Dallin is only a tree claim. None of these are counted as service.
These people are in the full 122,429-person tree but not among the 5,500 this page draws on. Their lines come from compiled medieval genealogies, which are widely copied and often wrong. Enjoy them as family lore, not proven descent.
These are ancestors born in Europe whom the tree places in North America. The year is the earliest American event the tree records for them: a child born there, a death, or a burial. That makes it the latest they could have arrived, not the arrival itself. The voyage is almost never recorded, and most rows are the tree as shown, not proven. The evidence column says what each year rests on.
These twelve ancestors have an arrival record attached on FamilySearch: a Utah pioneer overland company roster or the Germans to America index. They are the only arrival dates on this page that count as fact. Everything in the list below is the tree's inference.
| Placed there by | Ancestor | Evidence | Born in | Rests at |
|---|
Go back far enough and there were more of your ancestors alive at once than lived in some villages. Counted honestly, the tree also shows where it thins out, where the same ancestor turns up twice, and how much of any heritage estimate is simply unknown.
Filled positions out of the 2ⁿ possible in each generation.
Pedigree share by the birthplace of the earliest known person on each line, counting only lines whose origin is known. This is not an ethnicity estimate. "Traced only to colonial America" means the tree stops at a colonist. Those families almost all came from somewhere in Europe, and the tree doesn't say where.