Unfortunately this question is nowhere specific enough for me to understand what you are actually asking. Rank and status regarding what? If you can make your question a bit more specific, I'd be happy to try and help out some more.

A general answer, though, is biographical dictionaries. From the pre-Islamic Arabs through the medieval Islamic period, genealogy played an extremely important part in society. People loved talking about their ancestors, tracing their ancestry, and recording things like the history of their towns and those who lived in them. Sometimes, they focus on things like location (who were the generations of people that lived in a certain town?) and sometimes they focus on things like professions (who were the best hadith scholars in a certain period? who were the best doctors? the best poets?).

I hope that this is at least a bit helpful.