What approach or data structure would you use to store and display a family tree in a relational database?

To store a family tree in a relational database, the "Adjacency List" structure is often used. Each person is stored in a table with a reference to their parent (for example, a parent_id field).

Example table structure:

id	name	parent_id
1	Ivan	NULL
2	Maria	1
3	Alexey	1

This approach is simple to implement and allows building a tree by recursively querying for descendants or ancestors.

For more complex queries, the following can be used:

• Nested Sets — storing left and right boundaries for quick subtree searches.
• Materialized Path — storing the path to a node as a string.

But for most tasks, "Adjacency List" is sufficient and well-supported by standard SQL queries.