AncestryAI: A Tool for Exploring Computationally Inferred Family Trees

Abstract

Many people are excited to discover their ancestors and thus decide to take up genealogy. However, the process of finding the ancestors is often very laborious since it involves comparing a large number of historical birth records and trying to manually match the people mentioned in them. We have developed AncestryAI, an open-source tool for automatically linking historical records and exploring the resulting family trees. We introduce a record-linkage method for computing the probabilities of the candidate matches, which allows the users to either directly identify the next ancestor or narrow down the search. We also propose an efficient layout algorithm for drawing and navigating genealogical graphs. The tool is additionally used to crowdsource training and evaluation data so as to improve the matching algorithm. Our objective is to build a large genealogical graph, which could be used to resolve various interesting questions in the areas of computational social science, genetics, and evolutionary studies. The tool is openly available at: http://emalmi.kapsi.fi/ancestryai/.