Tuesday, November 10, 2009

Family Tree Statistics from MyHeritage.com

The http://www.myheritage.com/ website recently announced that they could create 45 different sets of statistics for a family tree on their system. The email I received said:

"... It's a completely free feature that analyzes your family tree and displays 45 interesting statistics using beautiful graphs, charts and maps, including:

• what are the most common first names or last names in your family
• where were your family members born (displayed on maps)
• what's the life expectancy for men and women in your family
• what are the most common birth months and zodiac signs
• at what age do people marry in your family
• what's the average age difference between husband and wife
• the average number of children in a family
• and more


"You'll also find juicy anecdotes, like the top families where the husband or wife are much older than their spouse, the people who married youngest or oldest, had the most children, the shortest marriages that didn't make it, the oldest living people in the family, and much more. "

You know that I cannot resist seeing graphs and numbers and statistics. I have a Seaver surname database with about 8,000 persons on the MyHeritage site.

The first set of graphs is an Overview of the database - with charts of gender, living vs. deceased, relationship status, common last names, and common first names:



The next set is the location, by country, of Places contained in the database for places of birth and places of death:




Next up is Ages of persons in the database, based on birth and death dates - the charts show age distribution, oldest living people, youngest people, average life expectancy, lived the most, and lived the least:


The Births graphs consider birth months, zodiac signs and when people were born (by century before 1900, by decade after 1900):

The Marriages data is for number of marriages, married the most times, when they were married, age at marriage, oldest when married, and youngest when married:




The Children data is for number of children per family, family with most children, people with most children, age when having children, oldest when had a child, youngest when had a child, age difference between oldest and youngest child, largest age difference between children in a family, and smallest age difference between children in a family:



These charts, and the supporting statistics can be very useful to researchers. They may point out problems with data in the database (for instance, my database apparently has a male age 13 marrying a female age 34 - probably not!).

I checked RootsMagic 4, Legacy Family Tree 7 and Family Tree Maker 2010 and did not see comparable family tree statistics capability (did I miss them? If they are there, they are pretty well hidden). Family Tree Maker 16 has a limited File Statistics capability, but nothing like the MyHeritage statistics. I think that this type of statistics analysis should be a standard feature of genealogy software.

2 comments:

Tamura Jones said...

RootsMagic does have a "Statistics List" report.

More importantly, both RootsMagic and Legacy include consistency checks.

Ed Ozzy said...

I have recently been looking around at a range of genealogy/family tree databases that include statistical data as not many software packages seem to provide this type of information.

I recently came across a great free software programme called "My Family Tree" which is produced by Chronoplex Software. The programme includes great statistical information and I like the look and feel of the software overall. There are some downsides eg no app (but the main thing for me was a great statistical package plus it is free to download).

They have a video of their software package on Vimeo - https://vimeo.com/149845249

Maybe you can do a review of this software package. It seems great to me and just what I was looking for and I was wondering why their software is not more heavily promoted or advertised online (obviously down to money, I guess!)