The process of recombination in population genetics, in its deterministic limit, leads to a nonlinear ODE in the Banach space of finite measures on a locally compact product space. It has an embedding into a larger family of nonlinear ODEs that permits a systematic analysis with lattice-theoretic methods for general partitions of finite sets. We discuss this type of system, reduce it to an equivalent finite-dimensional nonlinear problem, and establish a connection with an ancestral partitioning process, backward in time. We solve the finitedimensional problem recursively for generic sets of parameters and briefly discuss the singular cases, and how to extend the solution to this situation.