For most of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the
group was recognized at all, it was usually at
tribal rank and usually called Brodiaeeae. Most authors assigned it to
Liliaceae,
Alliaceae, or
Amaryllidaceae. In 1985,
Dahlgren,
Clifford, and Yeo treated it as tribe Brodiaeeae of Alliaceae. Toward the end of the 20th century, it became increasingly evident that the heterogeneous Liliaceae recognized by most authors was several times
polyphyletic and that
Brodiaea and its relatives were closer to
Asparagus than to
Allium or
Amaryllis. For these reasons, the family Themidaceae was resurrected in an
article in
Taxon in 1996. The
name 'Themidaceae' was first used by
Richard Salisbury in 1866. The name was
based on the now-defunct genus
Themis, which was established by Salisbury along with the family. The only species ever assigned to
Themis was
Themis ixioides. Its name was changed to
Brodiaea ixioides by
Sereno Watson in 1879, then to
Triteleia ixioides by
Edward Lee Greene in 1886. It is known as
Triteleia ixioides in
Flora of North America. When the
Angiosperm Phylogeny Group published the
APG II system in 2003, Themidaceae was treated as an optional
circumscription for those who thought that
Asparagaceae sensu lato should be divided into smaller
segregate families. When the
APG III system was published in 2009, Themidaceae was not accepted. In an accompanying article, it was treated as Brodiaeoideae, one of 7
subfamilies in Asparagaceae. ==Genera==