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Genealogies document relationships between persons involved in historical events. Information about the events is parsed from communications from the past. This book explores a way to organize information from multiple communications into a trustworthy representation of a genealogical history of the modern world. The approach defines metrics for evaluating the consistency, correctness, closure, connectivity, completeness, and coherence of a genealogy. The metrics are evaluated using a 312,000-person research genealogy that explores the common ancestors of the royal families of Europe. A major result is that completeness is defined by a genealogy symmetry property driven by two exponential processes, the doubling of the number of potential ancestors each generation, and the rapid growth of lineage coalescence when the number of potential ancestors exceeds the available population. A genealogy expands from an initial root person to a large number of lineages, which then coalesce into a small number of progenitors. Using the research genealogy, candidate progenitors for persons of Western European descent are identified. A unifying ancestry is defined to which historically notable persons can be linked.
List of contents
Introduction.- Research Genealogy.- Research Genealogy Knowledge Base.- Genealogical History of the Modern World.- Trustworthy Communications.- Summary.- Appendix A: Cousin Relationship Terminology.- Appendix B: Simple Lineages to the Unified Ancestry Progenitors.- Appendix C: Sample Lineages for Linking Historically Notable Persons to the Unifying Ancestry.- Appendix D: Sources Referenced in the Lineages.- Appendix E: Algorithms Used to Analyze Genealogies.- References/ Author Biography.
