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MyHeritage has just enhanced its Family Statistics feature. See their blog post from yesterday on this. Being a numbers guy, I really like this sort of information. It it interesting, provides great insights and can point to errors that need correction. I believe MyHeritage has one of the best sets of analytics of any program. In this post, I’ll show what they provide for my own family tree at MyHeritage.
My Family Tree at MyHeritage
Originally, I had just one big tree at MyHeritage. But as I approached 10,000 people in my tree, I decided to split it up. The reason is that MyHeritage’s relationship calculations only fully work for up to 10,000 people. The following paragraph is from a MyHeritage blog post from Sept 29, 2021:
So I looked at what parts of my tree would have very little overlap. I split out my nephew’s wife’s tree (534 people), my sister-in-law’s husband’s tree (158 people) and the tree I do for a friend of mine (213) into their own trees. The only duplication I have is just one person in my sister-in-law’s husband’s tree whose husband is in my tree.
That leaves me with 9,050 people in my own tree which includes both my and my wife’s families. It also includes my one place-to-place study of all the people who left Mezhirich, Russia in the early 1900’s to come to Winnipeg. My mother’s family and my sister’s mother-in-law’s family are part of this study.
Summary of My Tree
MyHeritage has a “Manage family trees” page that lists the 4 trees I manage. You get to this page by clicking on “Home” and then clicking on the “Family Trees 4” line.
The Manage family trees page shows this basic summary for my tree: (click on any image for a larger version)
This already gives interesting information. For the 9,050 people in my tree, there are 3,411 families (marriages/partners) and 2,328 unique surnames. I have 24,411 events (about 2.5 per person), 1,038 sources (each source might be cited multiple times) but only 190 notes (I’ve only recently started working on those).
Notice the words “Individuals:” and “Sources:” are in light blue. They are links. Clicking on them takes you to the MyHeritage Name Index and Source Index for your tree. You can also click on the name of the person in the earliest and most recent event to go to their profile page.
Family Statistics
Now click on the Home button and select “Family statistics UPDATED”:
If you have a big tree, you’re likely to see it tell you to wait a bit:
This does not seem to refresh on it’s own, but click one of the other menu items and you may find the report to be completed already.
The Overview Tab
The analysis of my tree is for 9,049 people but my tree has 9,050, so it must be leaving myself out of the analysis on this Tab.
My tree has 4,277 males, 3,960 females, and 812 of unknown gender. Jewish records tend to give a person’s father’s name, which likely explains why I have more males than females.
My tree has 5,648 living people and 3,401 deceased people. My tree is public, but MyHeritage privatizes the information for living people.
If you take the 9,050 people in my tree and subtract off the 2,968 single people and divide that by 2, you get 3,041 pairs of people that have relationships. However earlier, the statistics said there were 3,411 families. The difference is because of people who were married more than once. They’d count as just 1 married person, but as more than one family.
The “Male”, “Female” and “Unknown” under Gender and the “Living” and “Deceased” under Living vs Deceased are links. Clicking on them will take you to the Name Index that includes just that category. The relationships status items unfortunately are not links.
The top 15 surnames, and male and female first names shown at the bottom as a wordle is a nice feature. Hovering over each person with your mouse tells you how many of them there are. It says I have 89 Bronshteins, 187 Davids, and 64 Sarahs. Each of the names is a link that will bring up the Name Index showing just the people with that name. The Name Index includes 1 more than what hovering says so it appears you should add 1 to the value you see when hovering. The Name Index also shows that the “first names” count includes any uses of the name as a middle name.
The Relationships Tab **NEW**
This is the new section that MyHeritage just added. I love it.
Of the 9,050 people in my tree, 1,203 are blood relatives, including 50 who are my ancestors and 2 who are my descendants. 6,714 are related by marriage and 28 are related by adoption which gives a total of 7,946 people who are related in some way to me. That leaves over 1,104 people who are not related to me.
Each of those categories is clickable, again bringing up the Name Index with just those people.
The most useful is the “not related to you” category. Clicking on it and then selecting people at random from the 1,104 of them, I can see some of them are families that I have recorded in my tree because they were very possibly related (with the same surnames from the same town as my relatives) but I have not yet figured out how they were connected. Some others were families in my Mezhirich to Winnipeg study. But then some of the people I clicked on were islands of just one or a few people such as this island of 5:
They must have got disconnected from my tree during editing, and I will need to determine whether they need to be reconnected or deleted. I could not have easily found them without this category.
Next are some “step” statistics:
The first column shows the number of people 1 step away from me, 2 steps away, … all the way to 10+ steps away from me.
The second column shows the number of people at my generation, at each generation above me up to 7+, and at each generation below me.
The third column show the number of marriages between me and the people in my tree, up to 6 marriages.
Each of these categories is clickable bringing up the Name Index for these categories.
Now the next item on this Tab is my favorite. It shows the counts of my 1,231 blood relatives by how they are related to me.
And again, each box is clickable which will give you a Name Index for all the people with that blood relationship to you. This table is very good if you want to estimate how many people in your tree that you should share DNA with. Anyone who is 2nd cousin or closer, you will definitely share DNA with. 2C1R you should share with, but there is a slight chance you won’t. Any further and the probability that you share DNA with them reduces. For more about this, see Amy William’s article: How often do two relatives share DNA?
The Places Tab
The remaining tabs were available prior to the update. I might as well include them here for completeness.
The Places Tab shows 3 maps with the number of people born, died, and with residence facts in each country. Hovering over the country gives the number of people.
Unfortunately, these maps don’t have clickable links to the People Index.
The Ages Tab
This page is both interesting and useful.
Included are the Top 2 oldest and youngest living people and the Top 2 of those that lived the most and least. You can click on the “Top 10” at the bottom of each box to get more.
The oldest living people often may be people you just neglected to mark that they are deceased. My two oldest living people shown here are not living. There is a “Mark as deceased” link below their name that gives a very convenient way of correcting their status. I’ll fix them and any others once I’ve finished this post.
Other Tabs
The Births tab shows the number of people born by birth month, by zodiac sign, and by decade. I don’t think many people will make use of the zodiac sign. It would be nice if they had a list of people born on my birthday or within a few days of it.
The Marriages tab shows marriages and who has been married the most. There is a Top 10 link you can click on for the most marriages.
The oldest and youngest when married, longest marriages, husband much older, and wife much older categories could indicate you’ve done something incorrectly. You can see I’ve obviously made a few mistakes. It’s worthwhile clicking on the Top 10 or Top 3 to find other problems. Then rerun the statistics and check again.
You can also find and fix lots of problems on the Children tab. Oldest and Youngest people having children, and largest age differences are very useful. The smallest age difference is great to find twins. It would be nice if they had more than just the Top 3 of the smallest age differences since differences of between 2 days and 7 months probably indicate an error of some sort.
There is also a Divorces tab. I won’t show that one, but it has the number of divorces by times divorced, who divorced the most, the longest marriage ending in divorce, age when divorced, and the oldest and youngest divorcees.
Family Tree Builder
MyHeritage’s Family Tree Builder desktop software, that syncs smoothly with your online tree at MyHeritage, does not have its own analytics. It does have a “Family site” tab designed to open up a few different reports from the online site. However, the “Family Statistics” selection does not appear to be working as I write this. It likely should bring in exactly what I’ve shown above from the MyHeritage website.
Finding Errors in Your Tree
The Family Statistics isn’t the only way or even the best way to check your tree at MyHeritage. For a more thorough check, you can use MyHeritage’s Consistency Checker which is available on the website from the “Family Tree” menu item.
From within Family Tree Builder on your desktop, you can select from the Tools menu: “Tree Consistence Checker” as well as two additional useful checks: “Check for deceased people” and “Check for duplicates”.
The Consistency Checker online gives me 492 issues, and the CC in Family Tree Builder gives me 561 issues. That seems to indicate that they are not doing exactly the same checks so it is worthwhile to check with both of them.
Conclusion
MyHeritage’s Family Statistics has some very interesting information in it. Some of it will identify errors you have in your tree, so it is very worthwhile to go through each of the statistics pages and see if it all makes sense. Even if your tree is already perfect as I’m sure it is, you’ll likely find a few interesting tidbits of information to tell to your family.
Now I’d better run off and fix all the likely errors that the Family Statistics and Consistency Checkers found for me.
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