Family Numbers

[karenkarenn]

Hello,
I wasnt too sure on were to put this post but..
The Family Number of racehorses I believe its 1-20- what do they mean?
I went to the website of reines-de-course.com and I had seen some info but not enough to got into depth as of which current horses have which lines. Why just 20, why not 15 or 30? What family number has produced good horses?
Karen

[Lucy]

There are far more than 20. Each number stands for a 'taproot mare', one of the earliest mares used to establish the breed. English damlines are numbered 1-50, American family numbers are prefaced by an A, and Australian by a C (for 'Colonial').

Here are a couple of websites than can explain it far better than I could:

http://www.tbheritage.com/HistoricDams/FamilyNumbers.html

http://www.bloodlines.net/Navigator/index.html

[karenkarenn]

You Know Lucy You have been very kind to me. I want to say thanks but I am going to fumble around again.
I see in a couple horse tail female on this site that there is an X-1
It makes sense of the A and Ar, P's ect. But were does the x come from?
Karen

[Lucy]

I'd have to see which horse you mean to be certain, but I'm guessing you mean 1-X?

In this case, a letter following a number denotes a particular branch of that family. Most of the original founding mares had many descending damlines. If any line became particularly sucessful, the mare that founded it would be named a branch taproot mare, and that branch would be marked with a letter.

Take, for example, Smarty Jones. He's family 1-X. The '1' tells you that his damilne will trace back to Tregonwell's Natural Barb Mare, who lived back in the 1650s. The 'X' tells you that he traces to her through her most recent notable descenant, La Troienne.

[Bill from WA]

Hello

The story of the thoroughbred is well documented. Even in the infancy of the breed, scholars and horsemen devoted innumerable hours probing pedigrees endeavoring to pinpoint trends, or inheritable traits, that may, with the application of their own theories or research, produce a Champion racehorse. In those early days, the focus was primarily on the stallion. The mare’s role was secondary to the point that many weren’t even named, being “Highflyer mare”, or “Herod mare”. The focus on the male has continued even today, with most of the statistical references biased toward the sires. But in the twilight of the 19th century a small group of explorers were searching in a different direction.

Coincidentally, in the late 1800’s, several researchers in Europe were working on a different approach to evaluating pedigree by dividing the thoroughbred into female families. The tail female family was the object of their scholastic efforts. The tail female family is, mother to daughter, to daughter, and so on, in an unbroken line. Tail male is son to son, to son, in an unbroken line. The tail male line will be composed of different female families, while the tail female line will always be from the same family. Realizing that the tail female line would be the best way to classify the lineage, they embarked on their quest to produce a paradigm for pedigree research based on maternal history.

One of these investigators, an Australian named C. Bruce Lowe, traced the mares listed in the current (at that time) volume of the General Stud Book to their taproot mares as listed in Volume 1 of that record. He compiled a list of the winners of three English Classic races, the St Leger Stakes, the Epsom Derby, and the Epsom Oaks, and traced those winners back to their foundation mare. He then assigned a number, based on the quantity of winners tracing to her, with 1 being the most, followed in numerical order by the number of winners descending to each mare, ending up with 43 families. His work titled “Breeding Racehorses by the Figure System” was published posthumously in 1895.

In 1953 two Polish researchers, Bobinski, and Zamoyski, expanded Lowe’s work to 74 families in their publication “Family Tables of Racehorses”. Because of the sheer number of individuals involved, Bobinski and Zamoyski added letters to the numbers (1a, 1b, 2a, 2b etc), expanding each family even further, and included families from other parts of the world that could not be traced to the General Stud Book, the American families among them (A1, A2, etc). The letters that were added to the original Bruce Lowe numbers had nothing to do with the racing, or breeding success of the mares so designated, they were only added to simplify record keeping. Other works (Published by Japanese Bloodstock) have expanded the families even more. The family numbers as set forth in “The Family Tables of Racehorses” are what most researchers use today. The 1x designation was assigned a few years ago by a group of pedigree researchers who felt that La Troienne, because of the immense success of her descendants, deserved her own family branch. To my knowledge, this designation only appears on Pedigree Query, and has no “official” recognition elsewhere. However, it does make things easier because if the family is designated as 1x on PQ, you know it goes through La Troienne, and not through any other member of family 1s.

Bill

[karenkarenn]

Bill and Lucy
If you take a look at Wild Deputy through his tail family, I noticed that there is just a 1 and not a A1
Like my mare Deaconess she is tail family A11.
Is this an error on PQ part? Should he be an A1?
Karen

[Lucy]

No, there's no error.

Wild Deputy traces back to an English taproot mare - those are the 'original' family numbers, which are not prefaced by letters. Deaconess, meanwhile, traces back to an American taproot mare, hence the 'A'.