Klaus family tree of The Vampire Diaries

Klaus has six siblings, Freya, Finn, Elijah, Kol, Rebekah and Henrik.¹ The youngest, Henrik, was killed by a werewolf on a night of the full moon. To protect the rest of her children from the wolves, Esther turned them and Mikael into vampires, the first of their kind, called the Originals.¹

Klaus is the odd one of the set. Because his father was a werewolf, he is the first known hybrid of an Original vampire and a werewolf. A coven led by Esther cursed him to hold his wolf side down, and the curse is tied to a moonstone.¹ Breaking it drives his part of The Vampire Diaries.

Freya is the eldest, though the family believed her lost. The Originals reveals in its second season that she was the firstborn, the child Esther promised to Dahlia.² In the same season Mikael and Esther return, and Finn and Kol come back in the bodies of witches.² Mikael had died in the third season of The Vampire Diaries, when Klaus killed him with the white oak stake.¹ On the chart each of the four carries a cross from the point of death, and from the point of the return the cross turns faint with a return arrow after it.

Finn is the first of the siblings the chart loses. In episode 18 of the third season of The Vampire Diaries, “The Murder of One”, Matt and Elena kill him, and the episode shows that every vampire descended from an Original dies with him.⁵ That rule is why the sire lines matter to everyone in the story. Finn comes back in The Originals, so his cross turns faint at that point and a return arrow follows it.

The Originals moves Klaus to New Orleans, where he calls himself the king of the French Quarter.² Its first season ends with a birth. Hayley Marshall, a werewolf, has Klaus’s daughter, and Klaus names her Hope. The French Quarter witches kill Hayley, and she comes back as a hybrid.^2,1

Hayley later has a husband of her own. Jackson, a werewolf, is married to her when he is killed by Tristan in the third season.² The chart draws their marriage and his death at the same story point.

Marcel Gerard is the son Klaus chose. The Wikipedia article on Klaus calls him Marcel’s adoptive father.¹ The chart draws a green dashed arrow from Klaus to Marcel for that bond, in place of a parent line.

In the fifth and final season, Klaus gives his life to break the hold of a dark power called the Hollow over Hope, and Elijah makes the same sacrifice beside him.¹ Their crosses appear at the last story point, beside a cross for Hayley, who dies earlier in the same season and whose funeral follows in the seventh episode.³ Hope goes on in Legacies, which this page leaves out.

A sire line is the family tree of vampires. Each vampire is turned by another, and each line runs back to one of the Originals. When an Original dies, every vampire of that line dies too, as Finn’s death proves.⁵ On the chart the sire lines are drawn as dark red double arrows labelled Sired, with words at both ends.

The Originals names the first vampire each sibling made. Lucien Castle was the first vampire sired by Klaus, and Tristan and Aurora were the first sired by Elijah and Rebekah.² All three return in the third season, which is where the chart adds them.

The Vampire Diaries had already shown how far Klaus’s line reaches. In the third season finale, “The Departed”, Damon and Stefan Salvatore, Caroline Forbes and Tyler Lockwood fear his death, because Klaus is the originator of their bloodline.⁴ A review of “The Murder of One” places Katherine in the same line as the Salvatores and Caroline.⁵ The red outline marked K holds those five. They are not Mikaelsons by blood, but their lives hang on Klaus.

Klaus’s curse needs three deaths to break, a vampire, a werewolf and a doppelganger.¹ The doppelganger is a woman who shares a face across the centuries. Klaus went after Katerina Petrova, later Katherine Pierce, in 1492, and after Elena Gilbert in the present day.¹

The chart joins Katherine and Elena with a purple dotted double line marked Doppelganger, which is a likeness and not a kinship. Two orange dashed arrows run from Klaus to each of them for the hunt. At the end of the third season Elena dies with vampire blood in her system and begins to turn, which the chart records as a state on her.⁴

A square is a man and a circle is a woman. A double line is a marriage, and the couple line of an affair joins Esther and Ansel. The blue outline marked O holds the Original family, the green outline marked W the werewolves, and the red outline marked K the bloodline of Klaus.

Read this way, the Klaus family tree has three kinds of tie. Blood runs down the black lines from parents to children. Upbringing runs along the green dashed arrows, from Mikael to Klaus and from Klaus to Marcel. Vampire descent runs along the red Sired arrows and inside the red outline. Each coloured line carries words at both ends, so the arrow from Klaus to Lucien reads “sired him first” on one side and “his first vampire” on the other.

To build a family tree of your own series, open this chart in the editor or start from the story charts. The symbols are set out in the genogram symbols.