The Everdeen family tree of the Hunger Games

Katniss Everdeen is sixteen when the first novel opens in the Seam of District 12. Her father, a coal miner, was killed in a mine explosion when she was eleven, and her mother withdrew from her daughters for a long time after it, so Katniss fed the family by hunting.⁴

Her younger sister Primrose Everdeen, called Prim, is twelve and is drawn at the reaping for the seventy-fourth Games. Katniss volunteers in her place, and that choice opens the series.⁴ Prim later trains as a healer like her mother, and she is killed in the bombing outside the President’s mansion in the last part of Mockingjay.¹⁰

The epilogue of Mockingjay closes the Everdeen family tree with the two children of Katniss and Peeta, a daughter and a son. The novel never names them.¹⁰

The original trilogy calls Katniss’s parents only her father and her mother. It says that her mother came from the merchant class of the town, where her parents kept an apothecary shop, and that she married a miner from the Seam.⁴ Sunrise on the Reaping is the first novel to give their names, Burdock Everdeen and Asterid March.^3,11

In that novel Burdock is the best friend of Haymitch Abernathy at the time of the fiftieth Games, and Asterid is the girl he loves. They later become the parents of Katniss and Prim, which is why the Everdeen family tree draws them as a couple from the Sunrise position on.³

Burdock also gives the Everdeen family tree its link to the Covey. He has distant cousins on his mother’s side among them, and he calls Lenore Dove Baird, the girl Haymitch loves, his cousin.^3,11 The novel does not say which Covey family his mother came from, so the chart draws a dotted line of cousins and no line of descent.

Peeta Mellark is the son of the baker of District 12 and his wife, and he has two older brothers. He is reaped with Katniss, and she remembers the day years before when he threw her burnt bread from the bakery while her family was starving.⁴

Before the tributes leave, the baker visits Katniss with cookies and promises to look after Prim.⁴ In the cave in the last part of the novel Peeta tells Katniss why. His father once wanted to marry her mother, who chose a coal miner instead.⁵ The secret line between the baker and Asterid on the chart is that old love, which the Everdeen family tree would otherwise hide.

Peeta’s family is killed when District 12 is firebombed at the end of Catching Fire, and Mockingjay opens in the ruins.^8,9 In the epilogue Peeta and Katniss raise their two children in the rebuilt district.¹⁰

Before Katniss leaves for the Capitol, her friend Madge Undersee, the daughter of the mayor, gives her a gold mockingjay pin to wear in the arena.⁴ In Catching Fire Katniss watches the recording of the fiftieth Games and sees the pin on Maysilee Donner, a tribute from District 12 and the twin sister of Madge’s mother.⁷

Sunrise on the Reaping tells those Games from the side of Haymitch, who fights beside Maysilee, and names her twin Merrilee.³ Maysilee dies in the arena. The pin passes through her family to Madge and then to Katniss, so the Donner line crosses the Everdeen family tree by an object rather than by blood.^3,11

The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes is set at the tenth Games, sixty-four years before Katniss is reaped. Coriolanus Snow is eighteen and lives in the Capitol with his grandmother, Grandma’am, and his cousin Tigris, who keeps the family fed. His father, Crassus Snow, is dead, and the family has lost most of its money in the war.¹

Coriolanus is made the mentor of Lucy Gray Baird, the girl tribute from District 12, and falls in love with her. In the last part of the novel she escapes him in the woods, and her fate is never told.²

By the time of Sunrise on the Reaping Snow is President of Panem, and he has Lenore Dove poisoned to punish Haymitch.³ In Catching Fire he threatens the Everdeens to keep Katniss in line.⁶ Tigris returns in the last part of Mockingjay, when she hides Katniss in her shop, and Snow dies on the day set for his execution.¹⁰

Many readers ask whether Lucy Gray Baird is an ancestor of Katniss. No novel says so. The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes ends with her fate unknown, and Sunrise on the Reaping gives Burdock only distant Covey cousins on his mother’s side.^2,3 Some readers work out a cousin link from those lines, but it is their reading, not a fact of the books, so the Everdeen family tree here draws no line between Lucy Gray and Katniss.¹¹

The two Flickermans are a similar case. Lucky Flickerman hosts the tenth Games and Caesar Flickerman interviews the tributes of the seventy-fourth.^1,4 They share a surname, and the novels never say how they are related, so they stand in their own ring, apart from the families.

A square is a man, a circle is a woman and a cross marks a death. The joined lines over Maysilee and Merrilee mark them as twins. Each family has its own ring, and the Flickermans have a ring of their own to show a shared name with no known tie.

The dotted lines of cousins join Burdock to Lenore Dove and Tigris to Coriolanus, because the novels name those kinships without drawing the line of descent. The pink double lines are love, the green arrow is Haymitch as mentor, and the red lines are Snow’s hatred and the murder he orders.

To build an Everdeen family tree of your own, open the chart in the editor from this page or start from the story charts.