What the world’s largest family tree tells us about marriage and death in the West

The largest family tree to date — which includes 13 million people going back 11 generations and 500 years — provides new insights about marriage and death, and it all comes from public data.

The tree was created by a team led by Yaniv Erlich, a Columbia University computer scientist who is also chief science officer at the genealogy company MyHeritage. Erlich’s team downloaded 86 million public profiles from the ancestry site Geni.com (which is owned by MyHeritage). Many small family trees emerged, along with one huge one with 13 million people; about 85 percent are from the Western world. The tree, which is available online, includes (anonymized) data on when and where everyone died. When Erlich’s team analyzed the data to find trends...

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