The Shelbys of Small Heath, Birmingham, are a Romani working-class family who turn a back-street racecourse racket into a legitimate empire between 1919 and 1934. The tree begins with two failures of parenting: Arthur Shelby Sr., an alcoholic con-man who abandoned his children and returned only to swindle them, and their unnamed mother, a Romani woman said to have had 'the same devils' as her son Tommy, dead before her sons came home from France. What holds the diagram together is not a father but an aunt.
Elizabeth 'Polly' Gray raised her brother Arthur Sr.'s five children — Arthur Jr. (b. c. 1887), Thomas (b. c. 1890), John (c. 1895-1925), Ada (b. c. 1897) and Finn (b. 1908) — while her own two, Michael and Anna, were taken by the authorities after police found stolen sheets and a gin still, Anna at the age of three. Michael returns at age seventeen during the 1921 storyline and fuses to her instantly; Tommy later finds records showing Anna was sent to Australia and died there. Tommy orders his father out of the family house, and Arthur Sr. later leaves Birmingham after swindling Arthur Jr., while Ada marries the communist Freddie Thorne against the family.
The marriages are all alliances or wounds. John, widowed by Martha with four children including Katie and two unnamed sons, marries Esme Lee to broker peace with the Lee family; after his murder in the Changretta vendetta Esme takes the children back to the road and blames Tommy. Arthur marries the Quaker Linda, who fights Polly for his soul. Tommy marries Grace Burgess, the police informant who loved her target, and after her murder marries Lizzie Stark, who raises Grace's son Charles (b. 1922) as her own; their daughter Ruby (b. c. 1926) dies of tuberculosis in January 1934. Michael, urged on by his American wife Gina, turns on Tommy — blood against blood again.
The tree follows Steven Knight's BBC series Peaky Blinders (2013-2022) and the 2026 film Peaky Blinders: The Immortal Man, a fiction built on the real Birmingham street gang of the 1890s. Its shape is the point: fatherless sons, stolen children, outsiders like Ben Younger and Bonnie Gold killed for their entanglement in Shelby wars while Freddie Thorne is simply carried off by illness, and a matriarch who keeps the whole structure standing until violence takes her too. Every generation inherits the same bargain — money bought with someone's death — which is why the Shelby genogram reads less as a lineage than as a ledger.
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