Determining the Quality of Your Family Tree

I've read a number of discussions recently on various blogs and Instagram Threads about the importance of selecting #quality sources to document the claims made in family trees, along with tips on how to choose good sources, and what that even means. I won't rehash that information here except to say that Gigatrees was designed with these ideas in mind, providing ways to categorize sources and show reliability assessments for each claim based on the best quality source referenced. Gigatrees supports numerous methods for assigning categories to sources including those built into the #GEDCOM standards, and other vendor specific GEDCOM fields generated by 3rd-party applications, such as #source templates. For many, the most convienient way to categorize existing sources will be using Gigatrees configurations options.

Gigatrees classifies claims into 5 types: vital claims, non-vital claims, census claims, names and attributes and assigns each a weight according to their genealogical relevancy. It then aggregates the claims, their weights, along with the categories for the referenced sources, and calculates a #Quality Score. The chart below displays the Quality Scores for 1000+ unique users who ran Gigatrees using their own GEDCOM files. The chart shown is updated in real-time as new users run the application. Each circle in the chart represents each user's most recent build. The size of the circle is in proportion to the size of their GEDCOM file. Larger files generally take longer to build. Clicking on any user will show additional build details, such as exporting application, file size, runtime and the number of individuals and sources found in the file. It also displays how many claims were made, how many claims were documented, and how many source references were used to document those claims. Most of this information is used to determine a user's Quality Score. Obviously, no user-idendifiable information is displayed.

Quality Scores are shown at the top of the Data Validation page (Live Demo). I recommend for those who publish their family trees online, that they include their Data Validation page and Quality Score so that their visitors are able to judge at a glance the overall quality of the claims being made. The Reliability Assessments provide a further summary separately for each claim.