After a bit of googling, I found an interesting post on a blog called Murder, She Watched. (As a side note: female fans of Murder, She Wrote have a definite leg up when it comes to naming their writing about it.) It contains Jessica’s family tree as portrayed on all the episodes.

(Out of respect, I’m only posting a thumbnail. You have to go to her blog for a legible version, which she clearly put a lot of work into.)

Some of the notes on it confirm a suspicion I have about this project: a lot of the episodes are very vague about Jessica’s connection to her relatives. Many of them we don’t get last names or maiden names on, so there are a lot of possible family trees which would match.

Another interesting thing which I learned from the chart and should have known but never thought of is that Grady Fletcher, Jessica’s favorite nephew and far-and-away most often shown relative, is actually Frank’s nephew and only related to Jessica by marriage.

One other thought on this is that Jessica actually had a lot fewer nieces than one gets the impression she has. Murder, She Watched counted twenty relatives seen on screen, of whom only eleven are adult nieces or nephews (I’m not counting the two young children of one of Jessica’s nieces). That’s actually less than one per season.