Large Online Family Trees Validated by Scientifically Conducted MyHeritage Study

Here is a citation to this original article:

Kaplanis, Joanna, Assaf Gordon, Tal Shor, Omer Weissbrod, Dan Geiger, Mary Wahl, Michael Gershovits, et al. “Quantitative Analysis of Population-Scale Family Trees with Millions of Relatives.” Science, March 1, 2018, eaam9309. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.aam9309.

Here is an interesting summary of the article.

“Giant Family Tree of 13 Million People Just Created.” Accessed March 2, 2018. https://www.livescience.com/61905-giant-family-tree.html.

Here is a list of links to articles that have been written about the original study.

• The Atlantic
• Wall Street Journal
• National Geographic
• Wired
• New York Times
• Daily Mail
• The Verge
• Gizmodo
• New Scientist
• Nature
• BBC interview (7:00-12:00)

Once and a while, a new scientific article comes along that changes an entire discipline. For example, an article published in The Bell System Technical Journal, Vol. 27, pp. 379–423, 623–656, July, October, 1948 entitled "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" by Claude Shannon invented the whole idea of communication theory and had a huge impact on the development of computers. The study done by the authors of the article in Science will produce such an effect. One of the statements from the study may give a hint of the radical change this study could have on how genealogy is done in the future.

Taken together, these results demonstrate that millions of genealogists can collaborate in order to produce high-quality population-scale family trees.

The study also validates the use of cluster analysis in advanced genealogical research. It also validates many of things I have been teaching and writing about for the past fifteen years or so but modifies and corrects some other things I have taught and written about.

It is truly amazing what MyHeritage.com has announced and produced during this week during the RootsTech 2018 Conference. I will have plenty to write about for a long time.