Below is diagram of Cheyenne's pedigree showing five generations and extended breadth to include siblings of members in her direct descent. You can click on the diagram to get a larger copy.

This diagram is the result of many hours researching the information available on the Internet. As you can see, there are seven dogs I have identified, to date, related to Cheyenne with some level of seizure disorder.

I leave you to draw your own conclusion.

Below is a description of how I put all the various pieces together.

Searching a pedigree, especially when looking for medical issues can be quite difficult, and time consuming. Fortunately, for Belgians (all varieties) affected by epilepsy, there are some valuable resources available:

• The International Epilepsy Registry of the Belgian Shepherds. While there are not a large number of dogs entered in this registry, you may be able to find clues to indirect links to your dog's bloodline. Cheyenne has been added to this database here.
• The Belgian Shepherd Pedigree database in Poland.
• Pedigree Central. This site allows you to trace the pedigrees of many different animal breeds, not just Belgians. Belgian Sheepdog pedigrees can be searched from here.
• The American Kennel Club's (AKC) Online Dog Registration. If your dog was registered with the AKC, this page can be useful to find out the names of other dogs in the litter, or related to the sire or dam.
• Show results. In some cases, the results from (conformation) shows will have the registration number of the dogs entered. This can be useful if you are attempting to identify a relative to your dog.
• Internet Search Engines (Google, Bing, AltaVista, Yahoo, etc.) Doing a search of the internet using various words (in different languages) in addition to words describing the breed (Groenendael, Belgian Sheepdog, etc.) with a kennel name may also give helpful results.

  Some words which you might user are: epilepsy, kaatumatauti, epilepsie, epilessia, epilepsia, epileptic, epileptikko, kaatumatautinen, epileptique, epileptisch, epilettica, epileptico, seizure, kohtaus, haltuunotto, takavarikko, takavarikointi, ulosmittaus, saisie, beslaglegging, Ergreifung, grippaggio, asimiento, etc.

Digging into Cheyenne's pedigree, the first thing I did was to get the pedigrees of her sire and dam. These are available on the breeder's website for Cheyenne's sire and dam. These are also available from Pedigree Central: sire and dam.

This is relatively easy, and may produce immediate results if you search the Epilepsy Registry for names listed in the Pedigree Central list. However, in Cheyenne's case, it wasn't so easy.

Looking through the Epilepsy Registry and searching the web, nothing showed up for any of the ancestors Cheyenne's main (direct) pedigree. So it was now necessary to start branching off to increase the breadth of the pedigree.

Looking at the Pedigree Central information, there is a very useful link. It is the "BREEDING INFO" link. This will give the names of siblings (full and half) as well as offspring. It is worth pointing out I have found errors as well as incomplete information while using this database. While I could complain, I am very happy this information exists at all; as it represents a tremendous amount of work and is very valuable as it stands.

Another way to identify siblings or offspring is to do a search of the dog's name. In some cases, you will find a listing for the dog in some conformation show results. In addition, you may also find the dog's (AKC) registration number. Using this number, it is from the AKC, it may be possible to find siblings using the AKC's Online Registration. Using Cheyenne's sire's registration number (DN017849/04 this will sometimes also be represented as DN01784904) as an example, the 04 of of the number represents he was the fourth dog of the litter to be registered. Using this knowledge, we can find the following:

• DN017849/01 is Larelee' Abiding Hope
• DN017849/02 was not found in the AKC database
• DN017849/03 is Larelee' Iniko
• DN017849/04 is Larelee' In The Nick Of Time

Which would seem to indicate Cheyenne's sire was one of four littermates.

This technique can be used to broaden the list of dogs to search for evidence of epilepsy (or any other malady).

Another item of which you should be aware is repeat breeding. You may find all of the dogs in one litter do not appear to have any seizures. However, if you check another litter having the same sire and dam, you may find evidence of seizures. This was true in Cheyenne's pedigree. It is also true of Cheyenne: she is from the second litter produced by the same sire and dam.

Going back through each generation, one dog at a time, searching the Epilepsy Registry and the Internet, I was able to finally build the diagram above. For the curious, this took about 40 to 50 hours to compile the information.

In general, the Epilepsy Registry will be the main source of information. However, there are a few (VERY few) breeders who offer this information on their web sites.