02 MAR

13 million people tracked over 300 years to build massive human family tree

Using crowdsourced data from a social genealogy site, a team of geneticists put together a family tree that includes 13 million people. Researchers used this behemoth of a family tree to investigate how much heredity influences longevity and to track shifts in migration habits and marriage taboos in Europe and North America over the last 300 years.

Tree building

Putting together an extended family tree on such a large scale is normally a daunting and tedious task for researchers. They typically have to ferret out records from churches and county courthouses, and most of the time those records are the old-fashioned paper kind. Tracing long-distance connections using these records can be a nightmare.

But the payoff is big, because tracking that many people’s relationships can yield insights into cultural trends, economics, genetics, and population movements. That’s especially true if researchers can combine the family tree with genetic or health data for the people listed.

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Post Author: martin

Martin is an enthusiastic programmer, a webdeveloper and a young entrepreneur. He is intereted into computers for a long time. In the age of 10 he has programmed his first website and since then he has been working on web technologies until now. He is the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of BriefNews.eu and PCHealthBoost.info Online Magazines. His colleagues appreciate him as a passionate workhorse, a fan of new technologies, an eternal optimist and a dreamer, but especially the soul of the team for whom he can do anything in the world.