System and method for maintaining the genealogy of documents

A system and method that provides a mechanism for tracing the history of changes made to the content of a document by a user. The system allows a user to open an existing document, to make one or more changes to the content, to generate meta-data describing the user's intent for making the changes to the content, and to store both the changed content and the meta-data in a new document, while retaining the content of the prior document. The system automatically generates meta-data indicative of the identity of the prior document, and stores this meta-data in association with the new document at the time that document is stored or saved. If the prior document already has meta-data indicating its identity embedded within it, then the system accesses the meta-data from the prior document for subsequent storage in association with the new document. Using the stored meta-data, the system can generate a representation of a document family tree illustrating the genealogy of the document for display on a video display.