Go Down, Moses begins with a 3 paragraph introduction, set off from the rest of the story "Was" by being written in Faulkner's high style (it contains no periods, for example, so the entire passage has to be considered as one sentence). The chart below represents the McCaslin family as we get a sense of it from that introductory:
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By the end of "Was" we have a larger, though not necessarily a clearer understanding of the family. The name "Tomey's Turl" implies that the slave who runs away from the McCaslin plantation to visit Tennie on the Beauchamp plantation must have had a mother named "Tomey," and the fact that Hubert Beauchamp thinks of him as "that damn white half-McCaslin" means that the father of "Tomey's Turl" must have been one of the McCaslin men on the chart below, which is my attempt to represent the way we see the family by the end of "Was":
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The central character of "The Fire and the Hearth" is Lucas Beauchamp, but in the course of this long story we also hear about the following members of the McCaslin family, "black" and "white":
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Readers learn nothing new about McCaslin family history in the next two stories, "Pantaloon in Black" and "The Old People," but in section 4 of "The Bear" Ike McCaslin discovers much more about his familial past than he ever wanted to know — and that knowledge leads him to repudiate his place as heir to Lucius Quintus Carothers McCaslin, his grandfather. The genealogical relationships explored in that section are indicated on this chart:
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The final two stories — "Delta Autumn" and "Go Down, Moses" — bring the McCaslin family story up to almost the date of the novel's 1942 publication. In "Delta Autumn" Ike, now over 70 and again on a hunting trip in November, meets the woman who has been having an affair with Roth McCaslin, Ike's cousin Cass's grandson. Much to Ike's surprise and dismay, she turns out to be the grand-daughter of Lucas Beauchamp's brother James, whom Ike had traced into Tennessee and then lost in "The Bear." This means she is a "black" McCaslin, and also means that her relationship with Roth is technically both incest and miscegenation, just like old Lucius Carothers McCaslin's sexual relationship with Tenney one hundred years earlier. It also means that the infant son she carries into Ike's tent is Ike's youngest living relative, though Ike tells her that "maybe" in a thousand more years an interracial marriage will be possible. Until then, he passes on the answer Roth gave him (along with money, perhaps as much as the $1000 old Lucius left Tomey's Turl in his will). The answer, Roth says, is No. Ike also gives her son the silver-chased hunting horn General Compson left him in his will. As of this story, the McCaslin family tree looks like this:
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The final story must be set in 1940, a census year. In it we learn that Lucas and Molly had at least one other child, besides Henry and Nat: a daughter whose son is named Samuel Worsham Beauchamp. The story opens on the day he is executed in Chicago for killing a policeman, and ends as the funeral procession arranged by Gavin Stevens and other leading white citizens of Jefferson so that Molly can bring the body home goes out of sight on its journey to the McCaslin estate. Since it seems unlikely that Roth will marry, and since his illegitimate son disappears at the end of "Delta Autumn," it seems the McCaslin genealogy looks like this at the end of the line:
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It's interesting to compare the McCaslin story as Faulkner wound up narrating it with the genealogy he made for himself when he began revising the various short stories that make up the novel into the larger Go Down, Moses text. According to Joseph Blotner's biography, it was "probably" in the spring of 1941 that "Faulkner sketched out in pencil a genealogical chart" (Volume 2, page 1077). As you can see, there are major differences between this chart and the family history as the novel tells it, including the fact that here Lucius' daughter is given a name. The original chart is in UVA's Faulkner Collection, but I confess I haven't seen it myself. Here's my copy of Blotner's copy of Faulkner's outline (as Blotner notes, the "N." must mean "Negro"):
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