I’m creating a big tree in Gramps that will connect the family trees of many people into one. I only have my close family’s tree so far, but I want to add famous people to it. But who should I do first? The only people I won’t do trees for now are royalty/aristocracy, as I want to do them on the side alongside the rest of the tree (so I can connect them to other people in the tree easily).
Also, I recommend that you suggest people with well-researched trees.
Don’t think we can answer that. How you build your tree is a personal choice so surely only you can decide?
Good point there, but I can’t really decide at the moment, and I do want a backlog of people I could add to the tree.
Do you really think that the world needs another world tree? There are already FamilySearch-FamilyTree, Wikitree and Geni for example. I recommend that you add your tree to those World trees. Then you can see how you are connected to famous people!
Do you really think that the world needs another world tree? There are already FamilySearch-FamilyTree, Wikitree and Geni for example. I recommend that you add your tree to those World trees.
Obviously, I am very much aware of all of those sites, but I want to have a personal one just because. My tree on Wikitree is not complete, and neither is my Geni tree. My FamilySearch tree is sort of complete, but there are inaccuracies. The most complete tree I have of myself is from Ancestry.
I also have issues with all three of those sites (I could make a blog post about that).
First of all, you need to research your ancestors to see if they actually relate to any ‘famous’ people. Then, you must verify the ‘trees’ you want to import into your own to ensure they are accurate and based on facts.
There is an ocean of fake trees out there—many generated to scam people—especially those claiming links to ‘Viking Kings’ or French and Scottish nobility.
Also, please don’t use AI for this; it will just bluff you with ‘hallucinations.’
Interestingly, one of the easiest ways to find famous relatives is through French and English royal and noble families, primarily because they had so many children outside of marriage.
Nordic ‘Viking Kings’ are far more problematic.
Even though these trees appear on every ‘street corner,’ the Nordic countries were hit so hard by the Black Death that most lineages were broken.
In fact, it is estimated that only about 200,000 people today can provably document a connection to the old royal lines.
Furthermore, no DNA has ever been recovered from the Norwegian royal lineage, and the same can be said for Denmark and Sweden.
Although some remains have been found that are ‘almost certainly’ royal, the DNA data is not shared or available for genealogists or commercial services like MyHeritage or Ancestry.
This means there is no genetic ‘key’ to prove such a descent—all we have are the sagas and a very small number of documented paper trails.
Well, I’m not trying to connect them all specifically to myself; I’ll connect them to the tree as a whole, and then they’ll be connected to me. Don’t you worry, there will be no AI involved either. And I will use reliable sources for all of these lines.
So you’re planning on, say, adding [insert name of famous person]'s tree to your Gramps database in the hope that you’ll find a link between one of the people in that tree and one of your ancestors? Seems a bit of a random way of doing things to me. Not to mention a lot of work given the low chance of ever finding a connection to one of your ancestors and someone in [insert name of famous person]'s tree.
Plus, if you never find a link between one of your ancestors and someone in [insert name of famous person]'s tree your Gramps db will end up full of orphaned people. How will that help you see and explore your tree in the wood?
Final thought, if large organisations like FamilySearch, Wikitree, etc. can’t build a decent world tree…
Good luck with your effort though.
Well… I guess you’re right. I probably shouldn’t do this, or at least limit myself.
Don’t give up, just don’t do it in your main database.
I have several databases with lots of imported data where I’ve done similar things to identify individuals across different trees, but I never do that in a ‘live’ tree.
My point is simply that verifying if the data in an imported tree is reliable requires a lot of work.
You need to decide if it’s worth maintaining a tree like that, or if it should just be used as a research method to find information you can then verify.
You’re right. I shouldn’t do it in my main database. I’ll still include some royalty and aristocracy in my main database since I have royal and aristocratic blood.
In my opinion and effort like this is not a complete waste, though it
could easily turn into a huge time sink.
Another commenter mentioned several online sites which already have a
world tree. Family Search - WikiTree - Geni.com are mentioned, and I
think there are some others. I use Family Search extensively and have
dabbled in WikiTree and Geni.com. Keeping a local database in Gramps
solves two problems and addresses a third that all of these sites have.
The tools to tell how you are related to another person are very
limited. Family Search is the one I am most familiar with. It will
only tell you one relationship path between you and another person. If
you are related in multiple ways (double cousins, perhaps?), it will not
tell you that. Family Search also cannot be told to ignore a particular
person when it calculates a relationship. If that particular person
happens to be wrong, then you have learned nothing - or worse, you have
learned something wrong.
Family Search cannot tell you the relationship between any two random
people. It only tells the relationship between YOU and someone else.
As an example - I have some married couples in my database who were 1st
cousins. And 2nd cousins. And 4th cousins two different ways! There
is no way to discover that with any of the online trees.
The problem with noisy data is far worse for famous people.
I suggest NOT blasting a bunch of famous people into a tree and then
looking for connections. Find the connections first, verify them and
then add to your local tree. I like to work backwards from myself to
the common ancestor and then forward to the target person. Doing it
that way means all of the people I enter really are related to me even
if I run into a roadblock, and therefore the effort is not a complete
waste. It also does not leave unconnected people in my database.
Yeah, that’s a thing I hate about FamilySearch. At least WikiTree has those features.
I see. I should create my own interpretation of their relationship.
Good idea. I should definitely do that.
Actually, the better tool for this type of “trees”, it’s actually just a simple network graph, is to use a network graph tool like Gephi to create those massive trees, there you can find find shortest and longest path between multiple people in seconds, even in dataset with hundreds of thousands of nodes…
It can also find hidden connections between two dataset as long as the data is similar… in a much faster and easier way than in Gramps…
AND you can actually get “familytrees” in these tools to…
Just a tip…
I’ll give that a go! Thank you for telling me!
FYI, the BYU Relative Finder “Connect” feature lets you see the relationship between any two deceased people (assuming, of course, that they are somehow connected in the tree).
Am I the only one who has heard people say this about genealogy as a hobby? 
Huuuh? Never…
I started with the closest family, then a few hundred people, then a few thousand…
Now I’m knee‑deep in a single OCR project where the first version alone has 1040 sources over 20 years, more than 2 million rows and over 16 million datapoints.
And that’s just the “small” part.
If I keep going, it’ll probably end up covering 60–80 years.
And the funniest part?
The topic isn’t even genealogy — it’s ships.
But of course some genealogy data sneaks in as a side effect anyway… it might be a captain somewhere that fit some genealogy project somewhere in Norwegian genealogy…sigh.