Core Genealogy:

A Genealogical History of the Modern World

Core Genealogies

Basic Premise

Every cultural group has a Unifying Ancestry (core genealogy) to which all members of the group can link their ancestry. Once you have linked your genealogy to the core, you are related to every other member of your group who has also linked their ancestry. This provides a completeness metric for your genealogy.

For example:

Irish seek lineages to Milesius (ca 1745 BC)
Italians seek lineages to Romulus (ca 778 BC)
Scandinavians seek lineages to Woden (ca 215)
French seek lineages to Merovech (ca 419)
Scotts seek lineages to Fergus Mor (ca 445)
English seek lineages to Icel of Mercia (ca 463)
Russians seek lineages to Rurik (ca 845)

The challenge is finding a core genealogy that is based on historical fact rather than cultural tradition. A viable core genealogy should extend to the present, be highly interconnected, and cover as many cultural groups as possible.

Core Genealogy

For persons of Western European descent, a core genealogy exists based on the common ancestors of the royal lines of Great Britain, Spain, Belgium, Netherlands, Denmark, Norway, and Sweden. Any descendant of the common ancestors can be selected and a core genealogy formed based on the ancestors of that person.

The royal lines connect to multiple cultural groups:

Anglo Saxons - Kings of Essex, Sussex, Wessex, Mercia, Northumberland, and Kent
Asturia - Imams of Seville
Carolingians - French descendants of Charlemagne
Davidic King list back to Adam and Eve
Eastern Roman Emperors of Byzantium
Egyptian Pharaohs
English peerage to the 1800s
Franks - descendants of Clovis I
German peerage
Irish Monarchs - High Kings of Northern Ui Neill, Southern Ui Neill, Leinster, Meath(Tara), Munster(Cashel), Ulster(Aileach), Breifni, Tyrone(Ulidia, Oriel), Dublin
Latin Kings of Jerusalem during the Crusades
Lombards - Italian and French lineages
Macedonians - Cousins of Alexander the Great
Merovingians - Frankish descendants of Merovech
Ostrogoths - King Theodoric the Great
Persians - Darius the Great
Ptolemaic rulers of Egypt down to Cleopatra
Romans - Emperors back to Julius Caesar
Russians - Dukes of Kiev and the Tsars
Scandinavians - Kings back to Oden
Scots - Kings of Dalriada
Spanish - Kings of Aragon, Castile, Leon, Navarre
Vandals - Kings Geiseric, Hunneric, and Hilderic
Visigoths - Kings Theodoric, Alaric, and Athanagild
Welsh - Kings of Gwynedd, Deheubarth, and Powys

The royal lines are highly intermarried. In the Research Genealogy, the royal lines have 38,184 common ancestors. Their intermarriage is illustrated by finding the number of ascents to Charlemagne:

2.9 billion - King Willem of the Netherlands
4.2 billion - King Philippe of Belgium
4.9 billion - King Harald V of Norway
5.3 billion - King Charles III of Great Britain
6.6 billion - King Carl XVI of Sweden
7.2 billion - King Frederik X of Denmark
14.1 billion - King Felipe VI of Spain

Connecting to one royal line provides connections to the other royal lines.

A viable unifying ancestry is the ancestors of Prince George of Cambridge (56,796 persons). This automatically includes the common ancestors of the royal lines of Europe, links to all of the above cultural groups, is highly intermarried, and extends to the present time.

Evaluation

The viability of a Unifying Ancestry can be evaluated by analyzing the average connection year for linking your genealogy to the core genealogy. For persons born in the 20th century, the average connection year is 1622 for a core genealogy based on Prince George. Connecting to the core genealogy typically requires tracing your ancestry back for 12 generations.

You will then find that typically 99% of your ancestors and roughly 1% of your DNA will come from the core genealogy. It will take from 10-34 generations to link your ancestry to the core genealogy. It will take 50-60 generations to link your ancestry to a progenitor for Western Europeans.

The internal connectedness of a core genealogy can be evaluated by analyzing the "own-cousin" relationship of each member of the core. Every person has an ancestor to which they have multiple ascents. Their "own-cousin" relationship is the number of generations minus one to that ancestor. You can trace your ancestry up one of the ascents and your cousin relationship down the other ascent.

For a highly interconnected core genealogy, about half of the members should have an own-cousin relationship. For the core genealogy based on Prince George, 30.056 of the 56,796 ancestors have an own-cousin relationship. The average value is 6.4 cousin.

The ancestral connection point for the own-cousin relationship is limited to members of the unifying ancestry who have multiple children who are also members of the core genealogy. For Prince George, 9,609 ancestors have multiple core children. Interestingly, the ancestral connection points comprise only 3,239 persons. These persons provide a "short" list of potential ancestors to which you would link your ancestry. Charlemagne (747-814) is one of the connection points. The connection point with the most own-cousin connections is Richard I of Normancy (933-996).

This analysis illustrates why typical goals of a person assembling a genealogy are to find an ascent to Charlemagne and a royal descent. A better goal is to connect to the unifying ancestry.

The Research Genealogy can be characterized by counting the number of generations from a person born in the 20th century to notable events:

6 generations - typical lineage coalescence point for own cousin relationship
11 generations - typical connection to unifying ancestry for Western European descendants
27 generations - analytic estimate for connection to a progenitor for Western European descendants
35 generations - average number of ascents exceeds 200 million. This is the typical upper limit for connection to unifying ancestry.
42 generations - connection to Charlemagne, born 747 CE
49 generations - analytic estimate for when all members of the generation are progenitors
52 generations - first progenitor identified in Research Genealogy, Aethelberht II of Kent, born 696 CE
76 generations - connection to Darius I of Persia, born 558 BCE
119 generations - connection to Tao I, Pharaoh of Egypt, born about 1650 BCE with 400 quadrillion ascents

About Us

CoreGen3 Program

Mac Version for up to 350,000 persons is at https://appstoreconnect.apple.com

Search for CoreGen3

Windows version for up to 700,000 persons is at https://www.microsoft.com/en-us

Search for CoreGen3

To download a pdf paper on CoreGen3, click the link below:

To download a pdf book on CoreGen2

(an interface with one window), click the link below. The book describes the algorithms used for graph traversal.

Properties

For each person in the input gedcom file, the properties that can be displayed include:

PersonID, FatherID, MotherID
Birth and Death Years and Dates
Age, Alias, Title
First and Last Names
Location of Birth, Baptism, Death, Burial, Residence and First Marriage
Group Membership
Prefix, Suffix

Root Operations

For each person in the genealogy, the operations that can be performed include:

Error analysis for date biological feasibility
Ancestors, Number of ascents
Descendants, Number of descents
Ancestral and Descendant fractional distribution
Relatives, Treetops, Lineage from root to ancestral person
Partition based on Extended Families
Connection between two persons across minimum number of families
Link that gives the shortest path between two persons
Lineage of Maximal Ascent
Distributions for Nobles, Sources, birth Country
Own Cousin, Parental Cousin
Progenitors

What We Offer

Research Genealogy

Development

The Research Genealogy was assembled over a 33-year period by typing in information for 50 persons per night. A total of 2125 sources were used, ranging from history books, to compiled genealogies, to genealogy web sites.

For every person, the minimal information included:

First and last names
Birth year (estimated if not available)
Sources
Relationship to at least one other person in the genealogy
Country designation in each birth location

The genealogy contains 348,844 persons, spans all of the cultural groups in Western Europe, and provides a testbed for evaluating potential Core Genealogies. An average of 1.6 sources is provided for each person.

The Research Genealogy is published at https://gw.geneanet.org/rwmoore_w?lang=en

Validation

Unfortunately, almost every source that was accessed contained errors. To attempt to build a coherent genealogy, a biological feasibility constraint was applied to every date Ages at marriage, birth of a child, and death were checked for feasibility. All persons in the genealogy satisfy these constraints except for the Davidic King List, which uses traditional dates proposed by James Ussher, the Primate of Ireland.

In the construction of the Research Genealogy, the internal consistency of sources was used to assess reliability. Also, sources providing more detailed information were deemed more reliable. When discrepancies occurred, information from the more reliable source was used.

Coverage

The Research Genealogy includes lineages for:

Royal lines
British peerage
U. S. President
U. S. President spouses
Notable persons alive today
Historically significant persons

An attempt was made to link all persons listed in Palmer's History of the Modern World to the Research Genealogy. This provides a metric for validating the concept of a Core Genealogy. 87% of the persons (627 of 719) could be linked. Information available for the remaining persons proved insufficient to link them in.

The Concept of a Core Genealogy started with the 60 million persons alive in 1300, since the number of ancestors in a single generation at that time is greater than this number. By selecting a Core Genealogy based on the common ancestors of the royal lines, the size is reduced to 38,533 persons. By examining the internal own-cousin relationship coalescence points, the number is further reduced to 3,239 persons. By imposing constraints for:

At least 200 million ascents
Not an ancestor of Charlemagne
Born after 200 AD
Have descendants in the 20th century
Have at least 1000 descendants that are not descendants of Charlemagne
Have at least 52 generations from Prince George to the progenitor

the number of progenitors is reduced to 12 persons. This represents a minimal set of progenitors for linking your genealogy into a Western European genealogy. Linking to the Unifying Ancestry automatically gives you lineages to the progenitors.

The CoreGen3 program together with the Research Genealogy provides a Genealogical History of the Modern World. It is possible to trace lineages to historically important people. You can also trace lineages for notable persons alive today. You can determine how a group of persons are related, and find common ancestors.

An example is the set of common ancestors of the U. S. Presidents. They are all linked to the Core Genealogy, implying that the Presidents are cousins of George Washington.

George Washington Source

John Adams 8C3R*

Thomas Jefferson 9C1R*

James Madison 10C2R*

James Monroe 11C3R*

John Quincy Adams 8C

Andrew Jackson H7C3R*

Martin van Buren 11C2R*

William Harrison 10C

John IV Tyler 10C3R*

James Polk 11C3R*

Zachary Taylor H9C1R*

Millard Fillmore 9C4R*

Franklin Pierce 9C

James Buchanan 11C2R*

Abraham Lincoln 8C4R*

Andrew Johnson 10C4R*

Ulysses Grant 6C2R*

Rutherford Hayes 7C3R*

James Garfield 8C4R*

Chester Arthur 10C3R*

Stephen Cleveland 7C5R*

Benjamin Harrison 10C2R*

William McKinley 8C4R*

Theodore Roosevelt 8C6R*

William Taft 6C5R*

Thomas Wilson 11C3R*

Warren Harding 8C5R*

John Coolidge 6C6R*

Herbert Hoover 9C7R*

Franklin Roosevelt 8C4R*

Harry Truman 9C6R*

Dwight Eisenhower 12C5R*

John Kennedy 11C7R*

Lyndon Johnson 9C7R*

RIchard Nixon 8C7R*

Gerald Ford 7C8R*

James Carter H9C6R*

Ronald Reagan 8C8R*

George Herbert Bush 7C8R*

William Clinton 9C6R*

George Walker Bush 7C9R*

Barack Obama 3C8R*

Donald Trump 11C8R*

Joseph Biden 11C8R*

The number of common ancestors is 9,855. The five most recent are:

Blanche de Brienne (1251)

Blanche d'Artois (1248-1302)

William II de Fiennes (1244-1302)

Eleanor of Castile (1240-1290)

Edward I Plantagenet (1239-1307)

Privacy

The Research Genealogy contains 8,530 persons who were born after 1940. All of the information in the Research Genealogy was derived from public sources and is discoverable by any person with network access. To provide privacy, the information displayed for persons born after 1940 is restricted to initials and a birth year. No information is provided about full names, locations, full dates, sources, or occupations for persons born after 1940.

However, full information is provided about public figures who are documented in WikiTree and Wikipedia. Examples

include Royal Lines, U. S. Presidents, politicians, actors, singers, and entrepreneurs.

If the public information is deemed an invasion of privacy, send a message to the contact listed below. If a source is provided for your information, you should also consider contacting the original source of the information.

No information is collected about any user of the CoreGEN3 program. The CoreGEN3 program does not

modify any user data. Instead, information that is exported from the CoreGEN3 program can be input as a Gedcom file into your personal genealogy.

Why Us

CoreGen3 Code

The CoreGen3 program runs on Mac computers, OS version 13.4.1, and Windows computers. The Mac version supports genealogies with up to 350,000 persons. The Windows version supports up to 700,000 persons.CoreGen3 is freely available at the Mac App Store (SM) and the Microsoft Store. The components of the program include:

Gedcom file parser for input
Gedcom file exporter for output
Graph database
Data store
Graph traversal algorithms
Table-based display using sort, search, and scroll
Restart file
Summary statistics

Group Operations

Up to 8 groups can be defined. The Research Genealogy provides 7 default groups for Root person, Progenitors, Royal Lines, U.S. Presidents, Magna Charta Sureties, Spouses of U.S. Presidents, and Notable Persons.

Operations that can be applied to each group include:

Addition/deletion of persons from group
Relationship of the Root Person to each member of the group
Common Ancestors
Common Descendants
Common Relatives

Core Operations

Any person can be selected as the Core Root person for a Core Genealogy. The ancestors of the person comprise the Core Genealogy. Operations that can be applied include:

Select a Core Root person
Save and display a Core based on the name of the Root Person
List saved Core genealogies
Connection year
# Core Ancestors
Core Own-Cousin relationships. This includes a distribution of Own-Cousin relationships by century for all of the ancestors of the Core person.

Contact

Us

Address

Coregen

31052 Corona Road

Calhan, CO 80808

rwm@coregen.center

Phone No.

01-858-699-7567