Who is Mickey Mouse’s father? There is no canon answer to that. Surely he has one, but no one seems to know. He has nephews—Morty and Ferdie Fieldmouse, who have appeared in three cartoons if you include “Mickey’s Christmas Carol” and are apparently the children of his sister, Felicity. They’ve also appeared in a few children’s books. But even the Disney wiki, one of those fandom lists of love, has his parents listed as “Mickey’s father” and “Mickey’s mother.”

By comparison, the Duck family is exhaustively detailed. Carl Barks sketched out some of the details for his own personal use in the ‘50s. In 1993, Don Rosa published The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck, and he laid out far more, including altering a few of the details from the Barks version. It’s well enough known that I saw a question about it on the incredibly intellectual British quiz show Only Connect about the generations of the family. Admittedly, it’s all sandwiched in among all kinds of other esoteric knowledge, ranging from foreign-language puns to snooker players to the last four British queens named Elizabeth, but still.

The oldest member of the family, going back to the sixteenth century, is Pintail Duck, in the British Navy. Then there’s a huge gap, then there’s the great-great grandfather Cornelius Coot, founder of Duckburg. His granddaughter was Donald’s grandmother. His mother was a McDuck, so that’s how that family got into it. And if you wanted to know how Donald and Gus Goose were related, they’re second cousins. What other fictional characters, especially fictional animals, can you name that have second cousins?

I’m really not trying to shame them for working all this out. To the contrary, I find it fascinating. This is something that people really worked out, and it’s entirely possible that people in the years since Rosa have detailed more Duck relatives. In fact, you can scroll down past the family tree on the Wikipedia page, and you’ll find other characters who have been added on and aren’t on the Rosa list, much less the Barks list, which is of course much smaller.

I don’t know why the public imagination was more captured by the Duck family than the Mouse family. Oh, I suppose it’s in part because you get the nephews, and Donald’s nephews were much more a part of the cartoons that Mickey’s. And then they added Scrooge, but that’s in the comics, and why did the Donald cartoons take off? (Carl Barks, probably, but that just adds more questions.) The funny thing is that my own favourite duck character, Ludwig Von Drake, doesn’t really fit on the tree as developed, and Walt’s casual explanation is now itself canonically wrong. So there it all is.

My Disney+ membership comes up next month; help pay for it by supporting my Patreon or Ko-fi!