Ever wonder if you are the heir to a European King’s fortune or related to a famous movie star or American president?

Tracing bloodlines and discovering famous ancestors can be a time-consuming task for hobbyists and professionals alike. Genealogists spend countless hours to find and discover who their ancestors might be and still have no idea of the famous links and connections those ancestors might bring to the family.

Recently Cogito helped Ancestry.com add a cool new feature to their web site called Relationship Finder. It uses Graph Based Relationship Analytics (GBRA) to find out how you might be related to famous people.

The solution combines The Cogito Knowledge Center, Ancestry's OneWorldTree and custom development to integrated a web-based application which enables Ancestry.com's users to search bloodlines in real-time to find the common ancestors they share with over 1000 famous people.

After a person connect's their family tree to the OneWorldTree, they select “Find Famous Relatives” to run a real-time search. This function begins a “graph” query (the term “graph” comes from the advanced type of math theory we use for the search) and traces multiple bloodlines simultaneously until a common ancestor is found.

Beginning with the selected person, the query will look through four generations of ancestors to find a relative that has been tied into OneWorldTree. A line is searched until Ancestry finds the first OneWorldTree binding, or until they reach the fourth generation. The Relationship Finder searches the bloodlines of each of the ancestors who is tied in the OneWorldTree and returns the first 35 hits or famous relationships it discovers.

Here is an example to highlight how this works. Using the family tree shown in the picture, suppose we were doing a Relationship Find for William Edward Donahoo and suppose that the following people were tied into the OneWorldTree:

• Boyd W. Donahoo
• Emery W. Donahoo
• Sarah E. Senior
• John Van Cott
• Margaret Thornberg

 

 

 

 

 

If you clicked on Relationship Finder for William Edward Donahoo, we would look at his father, Boyd, and see a binding. We would include Boyd in the search and stop searching his line. We would then look at the William's mother and would traverse her paternal line all the way to John Van Cott (last generation) and see his binding and include him. We would then traverse the mother's maternal line and find Margaret Thornberg's binding, and include her.

This would mean sending the following to RF for the search:

• Boyd W. Donahoo
• John Van Cott
• Margaret Thornberg

 

 

 

 

 

 

With these three people in the query we now trace all of the bloodlines from each of them, and with some restraints in time and levels, return back the first 35 intersections between these bloodlines and the bloodlines of previously identified famous people.

The system returns a list of the first 35 famous relationships with the option to either view the famous persons person page or show the how the relationship was made between William Edward Donahoo and the famous person.

Each relationship shows the initial person, the famous person and the person the Relationship Finder identified as the “common ancestor.” The result page also summarizes the relationships of the commons ancestor to both the initial person (William in this example) and the famous person.

The show relationship view has two options, “hidden” and “expanded”. The hidden view just shows the three key people in the tree and summarizes how they are related.

The expanded version shows the complete path between all people with the common ancestor at the top of a “tree view.” You can see that both views show the respective relationship between the common ancestor person and the two end nodes (in this case William Donahoo and the famous ancestor, Walt Disney).

Of course, the relationship information we show is only as accurate as the member-contributed family tree information found in OneWorldTree. Ancestry.com is unable to verify whether these results are in fact accurate but future versions will display a quality measure on each connection. However part of the fun of family history is digging into the research and constantly improving the quality of connections and relationships you can discover.