March 04, 2022 | News | New Publication

How to Use Online Genealogies for Historical Demography

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In their recent paper in PNAS, Robert Stelter and Diego Alburez-Gutierrez analyzed the pitfalls and opportunities of using online genealogies to study long-term demographic processes.

“We show that online genealogies contain important biases and that ignoring them may cause misleading results. We focused on lifespan dynamics, but the same is true for other demographic processes,” says Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Researcher at the Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR). A new paper published in PNAS with Robert Stelter from the University of Basel points to these biases and outlines the developments needed to derive meaningful estimates from online genealogies.

Are online genealogies representative of the general population?

The two researchers investigate whether the historical lifespan dynamics of males in FamiLinx, a popular genealogical database, represent the general population, or whether they more likely resemble the values for elite subpopulations in the German Empire and the Netherlands.

They show that the historical lifespan duration and inequality for males who lived between 1500 and 1910 and who are listed in FamiLinx do not resemble those of the general population. In fact, they are biased toward the lifespan measures of scholars, a particular elite group for whom quality historical data are available.

Original Publication

Stelter, R., Alburez-Gutierrez, D.: Representativeness is crucial for inferring demographic processes from online genealogies: evidence from lifespan dynamics. PNAS (2022). DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2120455119

Authors and Affiliations

Robert Stelter, University of Basel and Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock

Diego Alburez-Gutierrez, Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research, Rostock

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MPIDR-Authors of the Paper

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Robert Stelter

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The Max Planck Institute for Demographic Research (MPIDR) in Rostock is one of the leading demographic research centers in the world. It's part of the Max Planck Society, the internationally renowned German research society.