DNA genealogy – global, open shared, lossless, efficient, fair and for all humans

I have whole sections of my DNA matches that are off by two generations. Everything is crowded into 3rd and 4th cousins and many of them make no sense. I have found that part of that is mistakes in trees that are propagating faster and with less and less review. Ancestry does not give sufficient tools to handle tens of thousands of DNA matches for larger questions. Like looking behind brick walls – which require substantial coordination and real database tools and AIs that can stay the course for practical work, not chat.

Much of it stems for a very very bad choice that Ancestry made to keep everyone locked in a single tree. Where families are discourage from collaborating, or working on projects together. All those deep ancestors with more than a 1000 descendants and many trees – the whole paradigm has to shift and it needs tools and policies and a much deeper and wider and more open way to work at that level.

Years ago I recommended “open collaborative trees” or collections centered about connected families — with NO living people at all. And as an “open shared resource” if you get to one of those deeper trees, you do NOT copy it in to your tree (there are exceptions where something new hast to be worked out). All the Ancestry programmers have to do (supported and encouraged) is to allow selecting from any tree that is accessible, and stable. Those resource trees (I built some examples for Mayflower first five generations and others that were ten generation back. The logic is easy – add someone by linking to then as you browse hints. All it needs is a collection id (“trees now are just collections of pedigrees) and a person id. I there were a resource tree for some common ancestor, it will have a unique ID for the collection and then each person there. And record ids for materials use. If there is someone like a Mayflower pilgrim, they might have 20,000 fact page copies on Ancestry and each has to be manually and continuously curated.

I have worked for 18 hours today so I am too tired to write it all.

I spent most of my career (over 50 years) designing and building integrated and global share systems. The last 27 years The Internet Foundation finding ways to streamline the whole of all human knowledge — not throwing anything away but finding all of it and making it useful for all 8.2 Billion humans. There are 5.4 Billion Internet users and they are badly served with everything is fragmented, incomplete and not if lossless shareable formats.

Filed as (DNA genealogy – global, open shared, lossless, efficient, fair and for all humans)

Richard Collins, The Internet Foundation