Have You Tried Pedigree Pie?

Nope, it's not something to eat, or even a celebration of Pi Day today (3/14).  It's a way to visualize your pedigree chart that was developed by the Brigham Young University Family History Technology Lab, which is a non-profit, student research lab sponsored by the Brigham Young University Computer Science Department.  James Tanner has a first look at Pedigree Pie on his Rejoice and Be Exceeding glad... blog.

1)  I wanted to try it, so I clicked on the link for Pedigree Pie (https://pedigree-pie.fhtl.byu.edu/) and there was a neat video to watch (at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FD5GkZm79Rs):

Apparently, this app was called "Grandma's Pie" in an earlier stage of development.

2)  I clicked the "Log In to FamilySearch" button, logged in, and was taken to my own Pedigree Pie which had information about birth places for 8 generations of my ancestors, back to the 6th great-grandparents.

There are two boxes near the top of the screen:

*  Legend - a listing of the countries depicted by the different colors
*  Percentages of 6X Great-Grandparents - a listing of the birth places by country of the 6X great-grandparents.

3)  There are three sliders at the top of the screen, under the "6X Great Grandparents" title, for:

a)  Single Generation - will show my ancestral birth places for the 6th great-grandparents:

b)  Multiple Generations - shows the birth place of each generation back through 8 generations:

Note that I had the third slider, for "Extrapolate Unknowns" inactive), so it showed a black color for my unknown ancestors.

c)  Extrapolate Unknowns  - which assumes that unknown persons have the same birth country as the last known ancestor:

The chart above has some isolated colors - like the red one in the lower part of the chart above.  I clicked on that and a popup box appeared showing the name and birth place and birth date of the person, plus a link to the person on the FamilySearch Family Tree, as shown below:

There are some "extraneous" birth places on the charts above - that is because the birth record for those persons do not identify a country, only a state in some cases, and even a church in one case.  Those birth places need to be edited in the Family Tree.

4)  A user can put any FamilySearch Family Tree Person ID in the small box at the top right of the screen - I added the PID for my grandfather, Frederick Walton Seaver (1876-1942), and saw his Pedigree Pie (this is one fourth of my total ancestry):

As you can see, his 8 generations are almost all United States born, with many English ancestors in his 8th generation of ancestors.  Some of the other birthplaces are errors - one ancestor is identified as born in Morocco.

5)  This Pedigree Pie can be useful to identify errors in birth places in the FamilySearch Family Tree.  Obviously, it depends on the accuracy of all of the input data for your ancestors in the Family Tree.

6)  James noted in his blog post that it could be used to compare the Pedigree Pie with a person's ethnicity determined by a DNA test.  I will look at that in a subsequent post.

7)  Try Pedigree Pie - you may learn something from it, and like it.

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Copyright (c) 2017, Randall J. Seaver

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