Congratulations to Terri Wheeler and Joshua Hodge, first and second prizewinners in SpringBoard’s Numbering Modern Family Contest! Both are preliminary applicants and took time from their portfolio work to practice numbering. Terri has chosen the FamilyTreeDNA Y-DNA test and Joshua the Ancestry test.

Here’s how SpringBoard numbers the cast of Modern Family.

Important elements to note are

  • Individual numbers beginning with Jay (1). Note that Manny (5) follows Joe (4), even though he is older, because he is not a biological son of Jay Pritchett.1 Alternatively, the groups of stepchildren and biological children may be listed in chronological order.2 Manny would then be number 4 and Joe number 5, as in Alternative numbering below, after Generation Two.
  • Generation numbers. Note especially Manny (generation 2, but of a different surname) and Lily (generation 1 of her biological line with this surname).3
  • Child list numbers. Note especially that Manny and Lily do not have child list numbers, as they are not biological descendants of the lineage in question.4

Generation One

Generation Two

Alternative numbering of Jay’s youngest children


1 Joan Ferris Curran, Madilyn Coen Crane, and John H. Wray, Numbering Your Genealogy: Basic Systems, Complex Families, and International Kin, ed. Elizabeth Shown Mills, rev. ed. (Arlington, Va.: National Genealogical Society, 2008), 19, bullet 1.

2 Numbering Your Genealogy, 22, Figure 7, 11. Muriel Mercer example.

3 For Manny, see Numbering Your Genealogy, 19, bullet 3. For Lily, see p. 20, bullet 5.

4 Numbering Your Genealogy, 18, bullet 3, also pp. 19, bullet 4, and 20, bullet 4.

5 “Jay Pritchett,” Wikia: Modern Family Wiki (http://modernfamily.wikia.com/wiki/Jay_Pritchett). All web pages were accessed 15 July 2016.

8 “Claire Dunphy,” (http://modernfamily.wikia.com/wiki/Claire_Dunphy); other information states her birth in 1973 or 1974, which is inconsistent with her being two years older than her brother Mitchell.

13 “Manny Delgado,” (http://modernfamily.wikia.com/wiki/Manny_Delgado).  See also “Javier Delgado,” (http://modernfamily.wikia.com/wiki/Javier_Delgado).