Friday, June 24, 2011

Genealogy Database Statistics Galore in MyHeritage

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I admit that I'm a statistics and numbers nut - I love to see charts, graphs, spreadsheets, etc. 

One of the tasks that www.MyHeritage.com seems to do really well, and quickly, is to provide statistics about a family tree on their site.  I don't think that I've seen any other online family tree or genealogy software provide this much information in a useful and displayable form.

On the user home page on www.MyHeritage.com, the "Go to family stats" graph is right in the center of the screen - you can't miss it!


I captured some screens showing some of the statistics from my MyHeritage tree with 39,903 persons in it.

1)  The Overview page has information about Gender, Living vs. Deceased, Relationship Status, Common last names, common first names - Male, and Common first names - Female:


Unfortunately, the Common name charts provide only a relative font size - my preference would be a Top 20 list.  The names are links, and clicking on them results in a list of all of the persons with that name.   My top 15 surnames are Seaver (4,099), Buck (668), Smith (614), Vaux (516), Fitz Randolph (498), Dill (444), Richman (351), Newton (307), Champlin (306), Culver (287), Bresee (248), Sever (203), McKnew (179), Hebditch (177), and Carringer (168).  I have 5,543 different last names in my database.

2)  The second page is Places of birth, death and residence (not shown below):



I was surprised to see that, out of 27,373 known places of birth (hm, lots of work to do there!), only 76% were in the USA, 16% were in the UK, 3% in Canada, and 3% in Norway.  Of my 14,073 known places of death, 84% are in the US, 10% in the UK, 3% in Canada and 3% in Norway.

3)  The third page shows Ages - Age distribution, Oldest living people, Youngest people, Average life expectancy, Lived the most, and Lived the least.


The "Average life expectancy" chart is an "age at death" chart, and shows, out of the 11,023 people with a birth and death date in my database, that 4% of males and 6% of females lived to be at least 90 years old, and that 41% of males lived past age 70, and 43% of females lived past the age of 70.  Average life expectancy (age at death) was 57 for males, and 56 for females. 

The "Age distribution" chart is confusing to me - it says that it is for 2,043 living persons, and the largest group is for persons over age 90 (17%; that may reflect that I don't have death dates for some persons). 

MyHeritage creates more statistics charts - we'll look at them in another post.

Interestingly, I couldn't find any comparable statistics in the Family Tree Builder 5.1 software program provided by MyHeritage free of charge.

Disclosure:  I received a complimentary MyHeritage PremiumPlus account from MyHeritage at the SCGS Jamboree as part of the Geneabloggers gift bag.  I received no remuneration for this blog post.

The URL of this post is: http://www.geneamusings.com/2011/06/genealogy-database-statistics-galore-in.html

(c) 2011. Randall J. Seaver. All Rights Reserved. If you wish to re-publish my content, please contact me for permission, which I will usually grant. If you are reading this on any other genealogy website (other than through an RSS feed), then they have stolen my work.

1 comment:

Joan Miller (Luxegen) said...

You are having lots of fun! I like stats too. Thanks for the great posts about MyHeritage.