A Case Study of Genealogical Networks from Network Science Perspective

In this paper, the analysis of a genealogical network is presented. The source database was constructed from the records of birth, marriage and death registers of a medium-sized Hungarian town covering some centuries. This genealogical network contains ca. 100.000 individuals. The topological features of this acyclic directed graph were analyzed by computer software in order to draw conclusions about the community. The results illustrate how network science can help the social sciences. A new measure is also defined to quantify the degree of pedigree collapse of a person having a partially known ancestor graph. The network was analyzed from the point of view of this ancestor-loss coefficient.