Editing Duck family (Disney) (section)

==Development==
{{Image frame|width=307|content=[[Image:Carl barks.jpg|150px]][[File:Don Rosa in Helsinki 2008.JPG|157px]]|caption=[[Carl Barks]] (left) and [[Don Rosa]] (right)|link=|align=right}}
In the early 1950s [[Carl Barks]] was in his second decade of creating [[comic book]] stories starring Donald Duck and his various relatives. He had personally created several of the latter, such as [[Scrooge McDuck]] (Donald's uncle) and [[Gladstone Gander]] (Donald's cousin). To better define their relations, Barks created a [[family tree]], wherein he added several previously unknown relatives to fill in the gaps. Barks never intended to publish this family tree and created it only for personal reference.

The first public attempt at a coherent biography of the Ducks was published in 1974. ''An Informal Biography of Scrooge McDuck'' by science fiction author [[Jack Chalker]] used names and events in the Barks stories (and a very few non-Barks ones) to create a life story for Scrooge. It provided the basis for a Scrooge McDuck biography included in ''[[The People's Almanac]]''.<ref>"The People Who Never Were -- Yet Live Today." ''The People's Almanac'', edited by David Wallenchinsky and Irving Wallace. Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday & C., 1975. p. 1235-1237.</ref>

In 1981, Barks was well into his retirement, but his stories remained popular and had gained him unexpected fame. He had given several interviews and answered questions about his personal views on the characters and their stories. Among other subjects, Barks described his early version of the family tree. Rough sketches of the tree were published in a number of [[fanzine]]s and were appreciated by fans for the authoritative background information this provided. At this point, Mark Worden decided to create a drawing of Barks' Duck Family Tree, including portraits of the characters mentioned. Otherwise, Worden made few changes, most notably adding [[Daisy Duck]] as Donald's main love interest. His illustrated version of the tree was first published in several fanzines and later in [[The Carl Barks Library]].

In 1987, [[Don Rosa]], a long-time fan of Barks and personal friend of Mark Worden, started creating his own stories featuring [[Scrooge McDuck]] and his kin. Rosa's stories contained numerous references to Barks' stories and introduced original background information. After several years, Rosa gained a large international fanbase of his own. In the early 1990s, [[Egmont (media group)|Egmont]] (the publishing house employing Don Rosa after [[Gladstone Publishing]]'s initial run), offered him an ambitious assignment — to create the definitive version of Scrooge's biography and a family tree accompanying it. This was supposed to decisively put an end to decades of seeming contradictions between stories by different authors, which had caused confusion to readers. The project was to become the [[List of Eisner Award winners#Best Serialized story|award-winning]], ''[[The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck]]'', a [[chronology]] of epic proportions that spawned numerous other [[timeline]] stories, collected in a [[The Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck Companion|companion volume]]. Rosa's ''Duck Family Tree'' accompanying the series was first published in [[Norway]] on July 3, 1993.

In the process of working on Scrooge's biography, Rosa studied Barks' old stories mentioning his past. Then he added several ideas of his own. Among them were biographical information for Scrooge's supporting cast, as well as designing characters in the family that had only been mentioned by Barks, such as Donald's sister Della and Scrooge's parents, sisters and uncles.