Trustworthy Communications and Complete Genealogies: Unifying Ancestries for a Genealogical History of the Modern World

Here's a newly published book that should be of interest to the professional/academic genealogist. By Reagan W. Moore, a professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, it looks interesting but hard going for the amateur or those of us with declining attention spans. If you yearn to establish a link to royalty or nobility this volume may give you heart.

Here's the abstract and table of contents from the Publisher, Morgan and Claypool:

Genealogies document relationships between persons involved in historical events. Information about the events is parsed from communications from the past. This book explores a way to organize information from multiple communications into a trustworthy representation of a genealogical history of the modern world. The approach defines metrics for evaluating the consistency, correctness, closure, connectivity, completeness, and coherence of a genealogy. The metrics are evaluated using a 312,000-person research genealogy that explores the common ancestors of the royal families of Europe. A major result is that completeness is defined by a genealogy symmetry property driven by two exponential processes, the doubling of the number of potential ancestors each generation, and the rapid growth of lineage coalescence when the number of potential ancestors exceeds the available population. A genealogy expands from an initial root person to a large number of lineages, which then coalesce into a small number of progenitors. Using the research genealogy, candidate progenitors for persons of Western European descent are identified. A unifying ancestry is defined to which historically notable persons can be linked.

Table of Contents: Introduction / Research Genealogy / Research Genealogy Knowledge Base / Genealogical History of the Modern World / Trustworthy Communications / Summary / Appendix A: Cousin Relationship Terminology / Appendix B: Simple Lineages to the Unified Ancestry Progenitors / Appendix C: Sample Lineages for Linking Historically Notable Persons to the Unifying Ancestry / Appendix D: Sources Referenced in the Lineages / Appendix E: Algorithms Used to Analyze Genealogies / References/ Author Biography.

I found a generous preview here and a link to buy an Ebook at $45.77 Cdn.

via a lead on David Rajotte's Documentary Heritage News