Genealogy, as it is on Earth, is often a preoccupation among civilized societies on Avishraa, especially those in which significant amounts of property and/or political power are inherited (as is frequent among the takmar). That said, the peculiarities among takma and xtauh societies on the subject of paternity, driven in part by their evolutionary psychology, require the subject to be approached differently than it is among humans.

Because neither species typically acknowledges biological paternity, charts of the ancestry of an individual are typically restricted to the matriline: the subject is at the bottom of a line depicting one's mother, mother's mother, mother's mother's mother, and so on. Likewise, charts of an individual's descendants will trace descent through daughters, but not sons.

In some cases, males are entirely omitted from genealogical charts. In others, where political alliances between families may be of more importance, they may be listed, but as husbands rather than ancestors. A typical format for family trees in the Heartlands, for instance, involves the tree running from oldest generation on the left to youngest on the right; under each female is a column in smaller text listing each of their husbands and the name of their family, while sons may be similarly listed with the names of their wives.