Duck family (Disney)

The Duck family is a fictional family of cartoon ducks related to Disney character Donald Duck. The family is also related to the Coot, Goose, and Gander families, as well as the Scottish Clan McDuck. Besides Donald, the best-known members of the Duck family are Huey, Dewey, and Louie, Donald's triplet nephews.

Members of the Duck family appear most extensively in Donald Duck comics (although some have made animated appearances). In 1993, American comics author Don Rosa published a Duck Family Tree that established the characters' relationships in his stories. He also created a fictional timeline for when certain characters were born (All birth/death dates given below are Rosa's). Other comics authors both before and after have shown variations in the family.

In the early 1950s Carl Barks was in his second decade of creating comic book stories starring Donald Duck and his various relatives. He had personally created several of the latter, such as Scrooge McDuck (Donald's uncle) and Gladstone Gander (Donald's cousin). To better define their relations, Barks created a family tree, wherein he added several previously unknown relatives to fill in the gaps. Barks never intended to publish this family tree and created it only for personal reference.

The first public attempt at a coherent biography of the Ducks was published in 1974. An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck by science fiction author Jack Chalker used names and events in the Barks stories (and a very few non-Barks ones) to create a life story for Scrooge. It provided the basis for a Scrooge McDuck biography included in The People's Almanac.

In 1981, Barks was well into his retirement, but his stories remained popular and had gained him unexpected fame. He had given several interviews and answered questions about his personal views on the characters and their stories. Among other subjects, Barks described his early version of the family tree. Rough sketches of the tree were published in a number of fanzines and were appreciated by fans for the authoritative background information this provided. At this point, Mark Worden decided to create a drawing of Barks' Duck Family Tree, including portraits of the characters mentioned. Otherwise, Worden made few changes, most notably adding Daisy Duck as Donald's main love interest. His illustrated version of the tree was first published in several fanzines and later in The Carl Barks Library.

In 1987, Don Rosa, a long-time fan of Barks and personal friend of Mark Worden, started creating his own stories featuring Scrooge McDuck and his kin. Rosa's stories contained numerous references to Barks' stories and introduced original background information. After several years, Rosa gained a large international fanbase of his own. In the early 1990s, Egmont (the publishing house employing Don Rosa after Gladstone Publishing's initial run), offered him an ambitious assignment — to create the definitive version of Scrooge's biography and a family tree accompanying it. This was supposed to decisively put an end to decades of seeming contradictions between stories by different authors, which had caused confusion to readers. The project was to become the award-winning, The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, a chronology of epic proportions that spawned numerous other timeline stories, collected in a companion volume. Rosa's Duck Family Tree accompanying the series was first published in Norway on July 3, 1993.

In the process of working on Scrooge's biography, Rosa studied Barks' old stories mentioning his past. Then he added several ideas of his own. Among them were biographical information for Scrooge's supporting cast, as well as designing characters in the family that had only been mentioned by Barks, such as Donald's sister Della and Scrooge's parents, sisters and uncles.

The family tree below shows the Goose (left) and Duck (right) portions of Donald's family tree according to Carl Barks. The chart is based on a 1950s sketch made by Barks for personal use, which was later illustrated by artist Mark Worden in 1981.