Exploring Sire Families

Taking a look at mares that consistently produce stallions

While doing some research for a client mare, I stumbled across an interesting tidbit - there have been 119 G1 winners by stallions tracing tail-female to Best In Show, the 5th dam of Arcangelo. This struck me as very impressive, with 15 unique stallions siring winners of at least two G1 races, and I wanted to delve a little deeper into the topic of mares whose descendants are frequently producing excellent stallions.

In case you haven’t read it yet, I recommend checking out my blog post on Arcangelo, where I take a deep dive into Best In Show and highlight some of her more notable descendants. For today, I want to talk about how her tail-female descendants have done as stallions, and compare that to some other mares born around the same era. Since Best In Show was born in 1965, I’ll look at mares born from 1960-1975 for this case study (I didn’t want to go more than five years back since these mares are already starting to get deeper into pedigrees and G1 Goldmine only searches the first 8 generations of a starter’s pedigree). I’m going to be taking a look at any mares born in this area who have at least 5 sire descendants, as determined by my personal female family reference document. For example, Best In Show’s female family line looks like this:

A section of my personal reference showing stallions that trace tail-female to Best In Show

Based on this document, which has been hand-compiled and is thus subject to being incomplete, I found 61 mares born between 1960-1975 with at least five stakes-producing sire descendants:

• Alluvial

• Amerigo’s Fancy

• Ballade

• Bebopper

• Best In Show

• Bitty Girl

• Bold Sequence

• Change Water

• Chris Evert

• Classy Quillo

• Cold Hearted

• Con Game

• Cool Mood

• Copper Canyon

• Courtly Dee

• Equal Change

• Fairway Fun

• Fanfreluche

• Far Beyond

• Foggy Note

• Glad Rags

• Glowing Tribute

• Gold Digger

• Goofed

• Grand Splendor

• Grecian Banner

• Impish

• Incantation

• Java Moon

• Lady Dulcinea

• Lassie Dear

• Luiana

• Milan Mill

• Minnetonka

• Moccasin

• My Charmer

• Nalee

• Natashka

• Native Partner

• Native Street

• Numbered Account

• On The Trail

• Patelin

• Priceless Gem

• Queen Louie

• Quilloquick

• Shenanigans

• Sleek Dancer

• Smartaire

• South Ocean

• Special

• Square Angel

• Square Generation

• State

• Stick to Beauty

• Strike a Pose

• Tamerett

• T.C. Kitten

• Ten Cents a Dance

• The Garden Club

• Too Bald

• Where You Lead

Quite a few of these mares are related - Glowing Tribute, Numbered Account, and Priceless Gem are all members of La Troienne’s family 1x; Incantation, Change Water, and Fairway Fun are all members of family 4m tracing to the 1841 mare Magnolia; Java Moon and On The Trail are half sisters out of the mare Golden Trail from family 4r; Moccasin is a full sister to the dam of Special, both representing family 5h; Shenanigans and T.C. Kitten are both members of family 8c; Alluvial, Amerigo’s Fancy, Nalee, Sleek Dancer, and Queen Louie are all members of family 9f; Far Beyond and Ballade are a daughter and granddaughter, respectively, of the mare Soaring from family 12c; Natashka, My Charmer, Bold Sequence, and Gold Digger were all members of family 13c tracing to Frizette; Lady Dulcinea and Too Bald represent unique branches of family 21a; Chris Evert, Classy Quillo, and Patelin are all members of the “true” branch of family 23b, tracing to Gallopade (as opposed to those members who trace to Lizzie G, who belong to a different genetic family).

For each of these mares, I used G1 Goldmine’s tail-female search feature to look at stakes winners sired by their tail-female descendants and to look at stakes winners descending directly from their tail-female line. For the rest of this piece, I will be referring to the stallions who descend from these key mares as being part of a “sire family,” and discussing the three most notable. It was fascinating to see how this group of mares has influenced the breed in the decades since their birth - and which upcoming stallions have a chance to continue that influence.