During LotR I was of the opinion that we should completely disregard the family tree, because all the adoptions, heir picking AI and MotH events make it a mess.

But now that we have the rule that all FMs belong (at least initially) to the house of their parent it might be more balanced to have all 4 starting houses on the family tree.

+ didn't KotR have a problem with how the family tree was populated from left to right or something? Basically the leftmost branch would get all the new family members while the rightmost got nothing until the whole row was filled out?

After the whole Order of St.John vs. The Rest of the Empire thing during the first half of LotR I'm quite leery of doing anything that will make one house weaker than the others.