Is There Such A Thing As A Country Family Tree?

I'm battling with organising many of my stamps. As we all know, countries come, and countries go.

I'd like to organise 'related' countries together if possible - for example, British East Africa became (philatelically speaking) Kenya and Uganda. This then morphed into Kenya, Uganda and Tanganyika, (the last of which was previously German East Africa) which then all became separate entities in their own right. Tanganyika was renamed to Tanzania at some point, and I'm still trying to work out where Zanzibar fits into the picture!

The South Africa area seems to be even more complex - I picked a simple example above. And don't get me started on Germany, it's various regions, colonisations, takeovers and splits. The French and Dutch colonies provide a similar problem, as does the Far East region (Malaysia etc.)

What I'd like to see is a graphical family tree, showing how various countries past and present are related. Dates of changes would be helpful too. I've tried to work through the SG catalog which gives some information toward this, but it takes a lot of switching between the various volumes to get even part of the picture.

So, does such a thing already exist somewhere? I've done a search on this, on other fora and on the wider web, but have drawn a blank so far...

The Stamp World History site would have been useful to you, but is, I think, no longer accessible.

When that stamp world history site went off-line someone on this board recommended the book "The Stamp Atlas". I purchased it and find it most useful. It does group the various stamp issuing entities together. I probably found it on Amazon or AbeBooks.

Linns also has a stamp issuing entities of the world website which, I believe, is free to use without a subscription.
However tt lists all the stamp issuing countries in alphabetical order. In the brief writeups for each country it usually would provide you with enough clues as to when a country changed it's name or became something else.

It might be worth a look. You could probably get the same information from wiki,

https://www.linns.com/news/postal-u...e-world.html

Thanks folks, I think I have a stamp atlas here somewhere, I'll need to see if I can find it...

It sounds like that stamp history web site was the nearest thing to what I'm looking for. A shame the content was never revived after the founder's passing.

Imperfectal, I will be able to post a "family tree" for Germany but only tomorrow. I also need to figure out how to format as we only have a 200kb limit for uploads.

Germania,

If you need to post something larger, you can send it to me and I'll upload it to my server and send you a link. There are no size limits on non-SCF-hosted images.

Through the generous support of PostmasterGS my Germany family tree is hosted on his website and can be found here:

[code]https://www.germanstamps.net/images...-cropped.jpg[code]

Just one important point to note - dates shown are when an entity issued their first stamp, not when an entity came into existence.

I created this chart about 35 years ago so did not have the www or a PC to help. Corrections appreciated!

And once again PostmasterGS, thank you for your assistance!

Click to enlarge:

Many thanks for that Germania - that's quite some work, and shows how complex the issue can become.

You might find dcstamps.com useful. It contains lists of "dead countries" and usually includes their new name(s) as they changed. It is also a great site for just poking around.

Many thanks for that Dead Countries link. It has a section called 'Transition Charts' which is exactly what I'm looking for.

Sadly, a lot of areas are missing from there but it's a start for my purposes.

Thanks again.