What Academic Ancestry is
An academic family: who supervised whom, up and down the generations, with examiners, coauthors and teachers beside them. It is built only from open sources, keeps the theses and works it finds as an index of authorship, and says plainly where its knowledge stops. It is not a ranking, and it does not guess.
An academic family
Scholars have long traced who trained whom. A doctoral student names an advisor; that advisor once named one of their own; followed far enough, the line reaches back through generations of teachers to the founders of a field. German speakers call the advisor a Doktorvater or Doktormutter, and the word says what the relation is felt to be: a parent of one's work, if not of oneself.
An academic genealogy writes those lines down. The Mathematics Genealogy Project has gathered mathematicians' doctoral advisors for decades; the Academic Family Tree, begun among neuroscientists, does the same for many fields; Wikidata, the open knowledge base behind Wikipedia, states a doctoral advisor for many scholars. Each is read for the same reasons: to see the schools a field grew from, to find who else studied under one's own teachers, to write a history of a discipline, or to see how two people are tied before one judges the other's work.
Academic Ancestry is such a genealogy. Look up a person and it draws their academic family: their advisors and their advisors' advisors upward, their students and their students' students downward, and the people who sat beside them on a thesis, wrote with them or taught them, drawn apart from the family itself.
What this one adds
Most genealogies are kept by hand, one field at a time, from what scholars and editors report. This one is read from the records institutions already keep. A university repository describes each thesis it holds: its author, its title, its year, its degree and, very often, the people who supervised and examined it. A national register lists a country's theses. Read together, these records hold supervisions in every discipline and every country a source reaches, far past the fields any one project began with.
Because it reads records rather than reports, it can keep more than the doctoral line. A record may name a thesis's committee, its examiners, its referees, the opponent at a Nordic defence or the jury at a French one; these are kept, each in its own role, and drawn beside the lineage when asked. It keeps theses below the doctorate too, a master's, a licentiate or a bachelor's thesis and who supervised it, shown when a reader asks for them. And where a repository holds works that are not theses, its articles, chapters and reports, it keeps those as works with their authors, so the record is becoming an index of authorship as well as of supervision. That index is new, and grows as each source is read again.
Most of all, every link says where it came from: a repository's own record of a thesis, a statement in Wikidata, a line found in the text of a thesis, or a suggestion drawn from shared papers. The kinds are never merged, and the page a reader looks at says which is which. Where every link comes from explains the kinds in full.
What it is not
It is not complete. The record holds what its sources hold, and no more. A thesis whose record names no supervisor adds a person and no line; a university whose repository has not been read adds nobody. Where a branch ends because the sources end, the page marks it so, since a missing source is not an absent student. What the record covers counts how far it reaches, by country and by decade.
It is not a ranking or a measure of merit. A person with many students in the record is a person whose students' theses were recorded and read; where a list is ordered by how many students a person supervised, as the shelves are, the order says what the sources hold, not who matters more.
It is not a judgement about anyone beyond what a record says. It does not guess: two spellings of a name stay two people until an identifier or a checked match joins them, and a supervisor that a rule only suggests is shown as a suggestion and never counted. A person who does not want to be shown can ask to be removed; the privacy notice says how.
Where it is going
The aim is a global academic ancestry: every supervision any open source records, in every country and language, joined into one family that a scholar anywhere can look themselves up in. It grows one source at a time. Each new repository or register is read openly, under the site's own name, at the pace its host asks, and read again on a schedule, most sources every night, so the record reflects what the sources say now rather than what they said once.
Readers help it grow. If an advisor or a work is missing, report it; if a repository holds theses the record does not read, say so, and it can be added to the sources to read.
Where to begin
Search for a person from the front page and their family is drawn there. The tutorials show the site in use in short videos; the shelves list the advisors with the most recorded doctoral students in a repository, a decade or a field; and the routes find how two people are tied through their advisors and coauthors. The next page, the record, says what the family is made of.