Word.ws English Dictionary

ahnentafel

ahnentafel noun: a genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors.

ahnentafel: a genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors
Image: Michaël Eytzinger, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Noun

ahnentafel

  1. A genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors.
    • To avoid the difficulties caused by this inventive numbering, three basic numbering formats are widely accepted in genealogical circles: the ahnentafel system for ascending genealogies, and the Register and NGS Quarterly systems for […]2006, Kimberly Powell, The Everything Family Tree Book: Research And Preserve Your Family History, Simon and Schuster, →ISBN
    • One well-known numbering system is called ahnentafel, which means “ancestor” (ahnen) and “table” (tafel) in German. You may also hear the ahnentafel system referred to as the Sosa-Stradonitz system (the names get easier, trust us) […]2008, Matthew L. Helm, April Leigh Helm, Genealogy Online For Dummies, John Wiley & Sons, →ISBN, page 50

Origin of ahnentafel

Borrowed from German Ahnentafel (literally “ancestors table”).

Questions about ahnentafel

What does ahnentafel mean?
Ahnentafel means a genealogical numbering system for listing a person's direct ancestors.
What part of speech is ahnentafel?
Ahnentafel is a noun.

Words near ahnentafel in the dictionary

  1. ahn
  2. ahneh
  3. ahnehs
  4. Ahnenerbe
  5. ahnengeist
  6. ahnentafel
  7. Ahner
  8. Ahners
  9. Ahnold
  10. ahnvelope
  11. ahnvelopes

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: ahnentafel (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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