Analysis of trees on Ancestry.com

The following data provides a summary of results obtained from an analysis of Family Tree's on the Ancestry web site. The objective was to gauge the frequency at which the lineage providers included information in the "Notes" and "Sources" sections of the Ancestry Trees. The sample universe is for the most common surnames given in the 1990 US census, coupled with the most common male given name "John". That is, these data are for all "John Smiths", etc, for which lineages are found in the Ancestry database. This analysis is based on data retrieved 5 September, 2007. At that time Ancestry's database included 502,305,276 names. This sample includes a total of 664264 names, or about 0.1% of the total in Ancestry's database.



N=Total number of lineages	 Nn=number of lineages with notes NS=Number of lineages with sources Nn+s=Number of lienages with notes AND sources