04 July 2016

Did you know --- from WikiTree

WikiTree is"a community (online) of genealogists dedicated to growing an accurate single family tree using DNA and traditional genealogical sources." As of 2 July it includes "11,685,385 profiles edited by 343,236 genealogists from around the world."

I received a large number of statistics derived from the WikiTree database from local Ottawa genealogist Mags Gaulden which may be of interest -- they were to me!

My question to Mags was how much British information is there in WikiTree? The answer, as of mid-May: 1,322,333 (12.32%) of the records are for the UK. That's for the 85% of the entries identifiable to a particular county. The major contributor is, naturally, the United States: (53.71%); followed by the UK, then Canada: (5.09%); Australia: (2.68%); Germany: (2.20%); Netherlands: 180,437 (1.68%), Ireland: (1.20%) and New Zealand: (1.12%).



A chart of ages at death in the whole database looks rather odd until you realise many people are entering a rounded age. It gives some idea of the degree of approximation in the data.  (correction: it's mainly due to WikiTree privatisation of some data). Be suspicious if you see a death year which is a multiple of ten, and not just at WikiTree; there's a good chance it's an approximation.

It appears there are are lot more people claimed to have died age 100 than expected, and a slight tendency not to claim someone attained the century and instead entered 99!


A chart displaying the ages of parents shows that mothers tend to be younger than fathers, and fathers continue to have children later in life. That's nothing genealogists didn't know, but there are a few anomalously old, and young, fathers and mothers.

17% of these events are in the 18th, 51% the 19th and 25% the 20th centuries.

To find out more about WikiTree check out the video at https://youtu.be/q2EAH-rC268

1 comment:

Magda said...

This is a fascinating article !