Structural and Temporal Hallmarks of Genealogical Networks
2026-06-16 • Social and Information Networks
Social and Information Networks
AI summaryⓘ
The authors studied many large family trees from different sources to see if human family networks share common patterns. They developed a new method called pseudogenerations to understand the timing of relationships within these networks. Their analysis showed that family networks often have similar structures, such as a few individuals connected to many others and groups that are tightly linked, plus a tendency for people to marry close relatives. They also found typical patterns in how information about parents and children is recorded over time. This work suggests that human kinship networks have universal features and offers a new way to compare family data.
genealogical networkscale-free distributionsmall-world networkdisassortative mixing2-componentsnetwork topologytemporal structurepseudogenerationskinshipunion-based distance
Authors
Japheth Carlson, Teayoun Kim, Matthew Lawyer, Wyatt Pochman, Emeline Thygerson, Benjamin Webb
Abstract
The rapid growth of the genealogical sector, spanning platforms with billions of records and millions of users, has produced some of the largest and most complex networks available for analysis. Despite substantial advances in genealogical network research, it remains unclear whether human kinship networks exhibit universal structural properties. We address this by developing an integrated approach to genealogical network analysis that combines network-theoretic structure with an inferred notion of time. Using over one hundred datasets from the Kinsources repository, we reinterpret standard network measures in genealogical terms and introduce \emph{pseudogenerations}, a method for extracting temporal structure directly from network topology. Within this framework, we identify common features shared across datasets. We find that genealogical networks exhibit scale-free--like degree and component-size distributions, multiscale family organization, and small-world behavior with respect to genetic and union-based distances. We show that 2-components provide a natural unit of genealogical structure, observe consistent disassortative mixing, and find that recorded unions are strongly biased toward short genetic distances relative to potential pairings. We also document temporal and demographic patterns, including shifts in recorded parental and child information, as well as correlations among recorded unions, parents, and children. These results suggest that diverse genealogical datasets share a common set of structural and temporal characteristics, providing evidence for universal features of human kinship networks and establishing a general framework for their comparative analysis.