Ethnographies of groups who draw genealogical charts are relatively common in anthropology. Bringing the ethnographic gaze to bear on genealogical charts drawn up by bureaucratic and legal institutions, however, is a fairly rare methodological strategy in both the anthropology of bureaucracy and kinship studies. Hybridizing these two bodies of anthropological theory and using ethnographic material on post‐socialist housing restitution in Romania, I describe how bureaucratic and legal institutions co‐create genealogical charts and use them as tools to make the composition of kin networks legible and to verify and validate them. Several articles of the Civil Code strictly regulate inheritance, amounting to what might be called, after Malinowski, the state's bastard algebra of kinship. These legal prescriptions inscribe kinship in bureaucratic certificates, documents, and genealogical charts, which help state institutions reach legal certainty about the flow of inheritance rights. Rather than simply dismissing genealogical charts as false science, anthropologists might approach them as a mundane form of statecraft and as bureaucratic inscriptions able to author social worlds and make law active in everyday life.