[Roget family tree.] Autograph pedigree of Jean Roget, father of Peter Mark Roget, creator of the Thesaurus.

See the entries in the Oxford DNB for his brother-in-law Sir Samuel Romilly and his son Peter Mark Roget, as well as Joshua Kendall’s 2008 biography of the latter, ‘The Man Who Made Lists’. From the Roget family papers. On one side of a 33 x 23 cm piece of laid paper. Heavily aged and worn, with some chipping and closed tears to extremities and central vertical fold, but nevertheless a striking and unique family heirloom, providing a mass of genealogical information: Jean Roget’s own autograph pedigree, heavily inked in black so that the 75 names it contains (almost all of them bearing the surname Roget) really do look like the fruit of a large tree. The names are arranged in five tiers, with the fifth (at the top of the tree) consisting of 25 fruit; one between the fifth and fourth tiers; the fourth with 23; the third with 17; the second with eight and at the bottom, enclosed in the tree trunk, Jean Roget himself. Some of the names in the top row are accompanied by dates. Next to ‘Philibert Roget 4eme’, in the second tier is written ‘Sa Femme est Mort[e] le 11. may a lage de 90 ans’. Autograph notes by Roget at foot, on both sides of the trunk. Those to the left include the following somewhat ungrammatical one: ‘le mois de may 1761 Il y a 33 personne qui s’apelle de leurs propre nom Roget et 5 Femme née Roget qui sonts / Ma cousine Mauris / Ma cousine Durand / Ma cousine Saussine / et mes soeur Cabot et [Favre] / en tout 38’. And to the right of the trunk: ‘veuve Brasier étoit lainée de veuve Detoux’. There are short notes in light pencil on both sides of the leaf.