Writing on how we might 'know' our personal histories in this 'digital age', Kim McCauley argues:

"Thus, on one level I am able to confer a hierarchical and arboreal framework upon the archive. To some large extent I am entrusted with the responsibility of interpreting the files so that I might encode them 'meaningfully'. But what I find really exciting about working hypertextually is that the archive also operates rhizomically by resisting a central narrative: what I like to call the family version of 'the party line'! Unlike expensive documentary type films of family histories in which extant sounds and images are woven around an often sentimental and lyrical narrative including Enya music and such key events as births, birthdays and weddings, the multimedia family archive becomes a searchable resource for future generations detailing not one idealised and authorised version of a family's 'life', but a multiplicity of complex and ever changing dynamic relationships, constantly assembling and reassembling over time and capable of endless updating. This is something that I find challenging but also a little scary, given that I have relied until now upon 'official' family documents and records and objective research methods to construct an authoritative narrative of who I am."
(McCauley, http://www.jcu.edu.au/aff/history/conferences/virtual/mccauley.htm)

There is, as far as I can tell, no family line operating in our family. There are only a series of versions. Each version reconfigures the past into the present in such a way as to eliminate the distinction between past and present.

Knowing one's ancestors rather than knowing of them then is impossible. Ontological certainty is displaced by spectrality.

"To these centered systems [arborescent structures], the authors contrast acentered systems, finite networks of automata in which communication runs from any neighbor to another, the stems or channels do not preexist, and all individuals are interchangeable, defined only by their state at a given moment--such that the local operations are coordinated and the final, global result synchronized without a central agency." (Deleuze & Guattari, 1987, p.17)