In the early years of the 1950s Joan Corder wrote to as many Austen descendants as she could find, and received much valuable information in return. In Akin to Jane she recorded just short of 350 descendants of George and Cassandra Austen. In the sixty years since her work, the efforts of many people have combined to extend knowledge of Jane's family, and their social and professional connections.

I have a particular reason for studying the genealogy of the Austens: Jane's brother Frank was my 4th‐great‐grandfather. Using modern genealogical resources, I have increased Joan Corder's tally of 350 of George and Cassandra Austen's descendants by at least five‐fold. In July 2022 the database contains just short of 27,000 individuals. A great many of them were ancestors, while others were from collateral families, from those of friends, and of other associates. Until I find a better way to present this research, a large part of my database can be found online at RootsWeb, a subsidiary of Ancestry.com: Jane Austen's Family Tree. This link will open the website in a new browser window, separate from this site.

Reader, please be aware that while this website was created before 2017, much has since changed at RootsWeb. At Christmas of that year, Ancestry.com suffered a serious data breach and took all of its sites offline. Some time later their Rootsweb section was brought back, but in a very limited form. Since then it has not been possible to add more information nor to correct errors. Nevertheless, following every individual's entry in Akin to Jane, there is a link to the person's entry in the RootsWeb tree.

The focus of this Austen tree is on pedigrees, rather than on biography. Every name in the index or on an individual's page, if coloured blue, is clickable, but from there the value of the RootsWeb format is not immediately obvious. Selecting the name of either of a person's parents in the tree will bring up a family view, in which all sibling offspring are displayed together. The Descendancy and Pedigree tabs, found at the head and foot of every page, will lead to charts – a drop‐down chart in the Descendancy view, displaying every descendant of a person in the record in a numbered list of up to six generations; and a horizontal tree in the Pedigree view, showing every ancestor on record, with up to three generations per page.

Ronald Dunning
February 2013
Revised July 2022