Expanded genealogy derived from extensive data reveals a family lineage spanning seven generations and involving approximately 6,000 individuals. Matrimonial ties are denoted by the use of red.
In a groundbreaking study published in the journal Science, a team of researchers, led by Yaniv Erlich, a data scientist and computational biologist at the New York Genome Center, have created a comprehensive family tree spanning 11 generations and containing 13 million people.
The team used data from genealogy websites Geni.com and MyHeritage to build this colossal family tree. Yaniv Erlich utilized the MyHeritage platform for this monumental task. Building such extensive genealogies by hand is time-consuming and difficult, making crowd-sourced information invaluable.
Between 1650 and 1850, the study found that married couples were, on average, fourth cousins. However, cultural changes, not transportation changes, may have been the driving force behind people stopping marriages with their cousins.
The dataset, geographically limited with 85% coming from North America and Europe, faced difficulties due to the lack of pre-existing methods for working with such data. The team pruned out improbable data before analyzing the 5.3 million remaining trees.
One of the key findings of the study is that heritage contributes about 16 percent to longevity, around 10 percentage points fewer than the 25 percent commonly cited in research. For people who live to be over 100, genes begin to emerge as a significantly more important factor.
However, Sebastiani, a researcher involved in the study, cautions against overinterpreting this conclusion about the genetic contribution to longevity.
The family tree built by Erlich and his team is publicly available for other researchers to use. The data could be used for various genealogical and scientific questions, such as local disasters, individual families, anthropological questions, and fertility rates.
Recently, Geni.com and MyHeritage have established their own DNA test, and future work could map genetic information onto the existing genealogy data. The Geno DNA Ancestry Test provides information about family ancestry, movement around the world, physical traits, and disease risk.
This massive family tree is a significant step forward in genealogical and scientific research, offering a wealth of data for researchers to explore and interpret.
