FamSearch: Visual Analysis of Genealogical Data

This paper describes an interactive visualization tool consisting of several views offering different perspectives on genealogical data that is stored and maintained by the Brabants Historical Information Center (BHIC). The dataset consists of several attributes, static as well as dynamic ones, containing information about several million people having lived in the Netherlands. With the tool, we can gain insights in family histories and build, confirm, and reject hypotheses, or search for one’s own relatives having lived in that region. Genealogical, temporal, and geographical relations can be investigated and linked to each other to identify correlations. Moreover, family events such as marriages, divorces, births, deaths, and similar can be explored. To support these tasks the tool provides several algorithms and interactive visualizations that enable data exploration. Visualizations include, amongst others, timeline diagrams, pedigree trees, population pyramids, sunbursts, and word clouds. We illustrate the usefulness of the tool by showcasing which and how patterns and anomalies can be found.