The Originals Family Tree — Mikaelson, Salvatore, Bennett and Petrova Networks

The Originals family tree, without the guesswork

The Originals family tree is not one tree. It is four families bound by blood, magic and a thousand years of unfinished business. The Mikaelsons are the original vampires, a family that turned its own children and then spent centuries arguing about what that vow meant. The Salvatores are two brothers in a small Virginia town, trying to become something other than their father's house. The Bennetts are the witches whose magic holds everyone else upright. The Petrova line is the bloodline every curse seems to run through.

This archive treats the family tree as data, not decoration. Every parent, spouse, sibling, adoption, mentor and loyalty connection is a named pair in a file. The interactive networks draw those pairs; an image model is never asked to invent a line. The result is a family tree you can check, filter and argue with — which is the only kind of Originals family tree that makes sense.

The families

The Originals story is not one bloodline. It is four separate arguments about inheritance. The Mikaelsons ask whether family is a vow or a sentence. The Salvatores ask whether two brothers can escape the same father. The Bennetts ask what magic costs and who pays it. The Petrova line asks whether a bloodline can ever belong to itself. Each network has its own cast, its own centre and its own way of failing.

The Mikaelsons: always and forever

Klaus, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol and Finn were turned together by their mother Esther after the death of their youngest brother Henrik. Freya, the eldest, was taken by Dahlia before the others were born into the story and returned to the family centuries later. Hope is Klaus and Hayley's daughter, born a tribrid: vampire, werewolf and witch. Hayley is the Crescent werewolf who becomes Hope's mother and Klaus's co-parent, and the person who makes the family's vow mean something outside a battlefield.

This network has eight characters and fourteen explicit edges. The gold parent lines run from Klaus and Hayley to Hope; the rose loyalty line connects Klaus and Hayley as co-parents; the sage sibling lines connect the original siblings and Freya. Klaus is the centre, but every line around him is a different argument about what family costs. Show-only: The Originals (2013–2018) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017); there is no book canon for this branch.

The Salvatores: blood, bourbon and brotherhood

The Salvatore story begins with Giuseppe Salvatore, a Mystic Falls founder who shot both of his sons rather than accept what they had become. Stefan and Damon woke as vampires in 1864 and have spent the next century and a half trying to become something other than that house. Lily, their mother, was presumed dead and returned as a vampire with a family of heretics. Caroline, Enzo and Elena are the people who make a new family possible; Klaus is the mentor who made Stefan into the Ripper.

This network has eight characters and sixteen explicit edges. The gold parent lines run from Giuseppe and Lily to both brothers; the sage sibling line between Stefan and Damon carries the whole grudge; the rose spouse lines connect Stefan and Damon to Elena, and Enzo to Caroline. The blue mentor line from Klaus to Stefan is the one that explains the worst year of Stefan's life. Show-only.

The Bennetts: the magic that holds

The Bennett witches are the reason anyone else survives. Bonnie, Sheila, Abby, Lucy, Emily and Qetsiyah form a line of magic that reaches back to the creation of the Other Side. Sheila raised Bonnie and taught her the cost of the craft; Abby left to keep her daughter safe; Emily's magic is still bound into the Gilbert compass; Qetsiyah is the first Bennett witch, the one who made the immortality spell and the plane that holds the dead.

This network has eight characters and eleven explicit edges. The gold parent lines run from Sheila to Abby and Abby to Bonnie; the blue mentor lines carry the craft from Emily and Qetsiyah to the living witches; the rose loyalty lines connect Bonnie to Damon and Klaus. Magic, not marriage, is the family grammar here. Damon and Klaus are in this network because they are bound to Bonnie by debts, alliances and the occasional unwilling friendship. Show-only.

The Petrova line: doppelgangers and survivors

The Petrova line is a bloodline built for other people's rituals. Elena and Katherine are doppelgangers; Tatia and Amara sit behind them in the canon; Nadia is the daughter Katherine left behind; Isobel is the mother Elena never got to keep. Klaus hunted Katherine for five centuries and used Elena's blood to break his curse. Elijah, Stefan and Damon are all pulled into orbit by the same face.

This network has eight characters and fourteen explicit edges. The gold parent lines run from Isobel to Elena and Nadia to Katherine; the rose spouse lines connect Elena to Elijah, Stefan and Damon, and Katherine to Stefan and Damon; the loyalty lines connect Klaus to Elena and Katherine. The bloodline is a trap and an inheritance at once. Show-only.

Seven profile cards

The archive includes seven archival profile cards, each made with the character-profile-card skill: Klaus Mikaelson, Elijah Mikaelson, Rebekah Mikaelson, Stefan Salvatore, Damon Salvatore, Bonnie Bennett and Elena Gilbert. Each card is a full dossier, not a portrait: age, identity, likes, dislikes, personality, a COMBAT radar chart, a TACTICS radar chart and a five-line character introduction. The cards sit inside their family sections, so you meet Klaus, Elijah and Rebekah with the Mikaelsons; Stefan and Damon with the Salvatores; Bonnie with the Bennetts; and Elena with the Petrova line.

Five design sheets

Five characters also have full design sheets made with the character-design-sheet skill: Klaus, Rebekah, Stefan, Bonnie and Elena. Each sheet shows a front, side and back view at the same scale, four expression heads, detail callouts for hands, boots and a signature accessory, and a small colour palette. The sheets are visual references, not posters: they exist so the same face and costume can be reused across the networks and the poster.

The family poster: seven people, nine edges

The family poster is made with the character-relationship-poster skill. It shows seven named people exactly once: Klaus, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol, Finn, Freya and Hope. It draws exactly nine edges: Klaus to Elijah, Rebekah, Kol, Finn and Freya as siblings; Elijah to Rebekah, Kol and Finn as siblings; and Klaus to Hope as parent. The poster is a summary, not the source of truth. The source of truth is the data file behind the networks.

Why a network instead of a poster

A poster is a picture of a family tree. A network is the family tree itself. In the four interactive networks, every edge is a source-target pair with a relation type, so a line cannot drift to the wrong person. You can switch views, drag, zoom and tap a face to read the relations around it. You can use it on a phone. None of that is possible when an image model is asked to draw a family tree from prose.

The poster still matters, but it has a different job. It is the one-glance summary: seven faces, nine correct edges, a legend that separates parent from sibling. It is generated from the same cast and the same pairs, so it cannot contradict the networks. That division of labour is the whole point: the networks hold the argument, the poster holds the image.

Frequently asked questions

Is this canon? The family relations follow The Originals (2013–2018) and The Vampire Diaries (2009–2017). Every narrative note is marked show-only. The Originals is a television original with no book canon; The Vampire Diaries has novels, but the show diverges from them, so we do not import book-only facts.

Why are there four networks? A single graph with every character becomes unreadable. Four networks keep each argument legible and let you start from the question you actually have: the original family, the brothers, the witches, or the doppelganger line.

Who counts as a Mikaelson? Klaus, Elijah, Rebekah, Kol, Finn, Freya and Hope are the blood family in this archive. Hayley is included because she is Hope's mother and Klaus's co-parent, not because she took the Mikaelson name.

Is Klaus Hope's biological father? Yes. Hope is the daughter of Klaus and Hayley, born a tribrid. The parent edge from Klaus to Hope is one of the nine edges on the poster.

Can I read it on a phone? Yes. The networks are built to be dragged, zoomed and tapped. The hub and this archive page reflow to a single column, and the images are served as compressed WebP files.

Open the archive

Start with the hub, then open the family you came for. If you want the original family, open the Mikaelsons. If you want the brothers, open the Salvatores. If you want the magic, open the Bennetts. If you want the doppelganger line, open the Petrova network. The poster is there when you need the whole family in one glance.

Every layer of this archive was built with four named skills: relationship-network for the four interactive graphs, character-relationship-poster for the family poster, character-profile-card for the seven dossiers, and character-design-sheet for the five turnaround sheets. The data, the drawings and the pages are separate on purpose, so each one can be checked against the others.