Word for killing off or attempting to kill off an entire bloodline?

I would like to know if there is a word or phrase for a systematic campaign to annihilate every descendant of a particular ancestor.

We have the word 'genocide' for killing off an entire race, and plenty of words for killing people based on how they are related to you (fratricide, filicide, et. al.), but looking over the "cide" words on The Phrontistery and the List of types of killing on Wikipedia, I couldn't find a term for systematically killing an entire bloodline.

My question is prompted by a US news story about the horrific murder of 8 members of the same family, but those murders are not an example of what I'm thinking of because the children of the victims were left alive, so the motive for the killings was not to kill off the bloodline. The sense that some group had coordinated an attack against just one family is what made me wonder what the "not an entire race, just one bloodline" version of 'genocide' would be called.

Searching the Internet for "kill off" and bloodline sends me straight into the land of vampires, Illuminati, reptilian overlords, and, naturally, Priory of Sion nonsense so I haven't had much luck finding a thread to pull.

It may be that there is no word for it in the sense of murdering a human bloodline, because we just don't attempt kill off our royals down to the last heir often enough to coin a term for it. Maybe there is a scientific term for culling a line from a test population as part of biological research?


Familicide comes close to what you are looking for:

  • is a type of murder or murder-suicide in which at least one spouse and one or more children are killed, or in which a parent or parents and possibly other relatives such as siblings and grandparents are killed.
  • In some cases all of the family members' lives are taken. If only the parents are killed, the case may also be referred to as a parricide. Where all members of a family are killed, including when the killing takes the form of a murder-suicide, the crime may be referred to as family annihilation.

(Wikipedia)


There seems to be no special single word for this. A Wikipedia article on a relevant Ancient Chinese punishment, the "Nine familial exterminations" (株连九族), just uses phrases like "familial extermination", "family execution".