Samuel Lothrop passes one million profiles within 9 circles.

Question

Samuel Lothrop has been from over one year a focus profile for the 100 Circles project, and he was already notable for having over one million profiles in his ten first circles, and one of the lowest mean distance to all connected profiles (17.3 as of today).

As of today, the one milion is reached within 9 circles. Otherwise said : over one million profiles stand at 9 degrees or less from Samuel Lothrop.

Are you in this lot?  My own distance is 18, just above the average. Living members of the 9th circle are certainly not many, if any.

(edited following answer by Stu Ward)

Comments

Samuel Lothrop is 22 Degrees from Leif Biberg Kristensen.

It should be said, though, that I have created very few profiles born after 1820, and even fewer of them with spouses and children.

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Samuel Lothrop is 18 Degrees from Eva Ekeblad

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15 degrees for me. It's a sign of the dense interconnectivity of his circles that with three American grandparents I'm only three degrees closer than Bernard and Eva.

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To be honest, I am at 18 thx to my wife who is at 17, via  a daughter of the famous Colonel Herman Thorn and her marriage in French aristocracy.

If I skip my wife, I am at ... 27 through my 7th cousin once removed Suzanne Gardahaut. It needs 15 steps to get to my cousin, and she is at 12 from Samuel thanks to her American marriage(s). And Suzanne is, so far, the closest gateway of my Breton ancestors into America, followed by my other 7th cousin once removed Amy Novotny, at distance 13 ... but Amy is at distance 29 from Samuel, although she is an American citizen ... of Czech and Breton parents.

I thought a few of my Breton cousins and relatives would have emigrated to America, but I found none beyond the above quoted, and the emigration took place in the 1900s.

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"Samuel Lothrop is 13 Degrees from Liz Marshall"!

Answer 1

I'm a direct descent of his father in law. That's 12 degrees.  I think to get within 9 degrees you would need to be dead.

Comments

Ho well, that's true. I forgot that he was so far away in the past.

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Actually, I would not affirm that there is no living descendant at the 9th generation. A quick browsing of the descendancy  led me to Emma J (Barse) Watkins. Born in 1924, she died in 1996, but could have lived to be a centenarian.

Worth searching a bit more ... Alice J (Lathrop) Boldt (1919 - 2007)

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How would someone check the connections for someone else?  Could a person closer to today, but decended from lots of pilgrims, lots of descendants, etc have a higher number?  My favourite ancestor is https://www.wikitree.com/wiki/Ward-10510 simply because he comes from a big family and his kids were baby machines.

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@Stu: You can go to the Connection Finder and enter any two WikiTree IDs to see how they are connected.

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I understand that, I mean, how do you find how many people are in each circle?  The connection finder stops at 1000 people. For my ancestor, that puts him in degree 3.

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Two answers :

#1 Eva Ekeblad in this page presents such candidates, including LDS patriarchs, but even Brigham Young does not beat Samuel Lothrop. As of today, he has "only" 753,871 profiles within 9 degrees.

#2 There is a query provided by Aleš yielding the population of all circles for any profile. The URL is not public (so far) because it is costly in server resources.

I just ran it nevertheless for Ward-10510 and results are as following (distance d, population at d, population up to d). You see that the million is passed in the 11th circle only.

I will send you more details in PM.

9,187619,327204
10,364445,691649
11,555819,1247468

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Wow, thanks.  I can imagine people could really burn up the CPUs doing calculations like that.

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Indeed. Aleš is particularly proud - and he should be - to have this query yielding the results in less than 20s over a 25 million nodes graph. Which is just unbelievable. Your ancestor's server time cost was exactly 17.203 s.

 

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I should have checked earlier, Samuel Lothrop is 9 Degrees from Jonathan Ward

Answer 2

Surprisingly, I'm 13 degrees.

Comments

About 25% of (connected) profiles are less than 13 degrees.

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Fascinating work, Bernard! Great job on this! I hope you'll keep us updated as time goes on. 

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Yes, of course! Stay tuned at the various "100 Circles" pages and annexes, they tend to proliferate in an organic way.

And follow the "100_circles" tag here on G2G, where every new find and/or milestone will be posted.

Answer 3

My wife, Kathy, appears to be at 14 degrees.......in the past I remember being very close when Maurice Berkeley was possibly at the center......if my memory is correct.

Comments

John, I think you refer to the centrality as defined by the "Outer Rim" profiles. Maurice Berkeley was a transient "central profile" in this respect (equidistant from the furthest branches). Now Mary Stuart is the reference profile in that view of centrality and you are 14 steps from her also.

Samuel Lothrop and Mary Stuart are both "central", but under two different definitions of centrality.

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Thankyou, Bernard.....you have given me some information with which I can further study the subject, of which you previously caught my attention.

Answer 4

I am also 14 degrees, It would be fascinating to see a breakdown between living and non-living.

Comments

Leif and Bernard, I make exceptions for my living relatives whose DNA test information I want to display.  (Of course, they have to join WT, but they rarely make any contributions other than to their own profiles.)

One reason I suspect that, as I said above, some newcomers add their entire living families is that there seems to be a huge difference (about 3.8 million) between the current number of WT profiles and the apparent number of WT numbers (the eight-digit number we can all find, for example, at the top of our suggestions lists) issued to date.  The only reason I know of for deletions of large numbers of profiles from WT is that when a member quits, all the member's living profiles without any other profile manager are deleted.

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Deletion is not the most important mechanism, I think merging is the main one. Every merge is one less profile. The ids of profiles created as of today are in the 33 million range, and we have 29 million profiles. 4 million merge since the beginning of WT is not absurd.

Bear in mind that e.g., every change of the LNAB is actually a new profile + merge, even if it's just correcting a typo at creation, because you created the profile from a death record with a wrong spelling, and discover the birth after etc.

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Bernard, I'm not sure, but I believe that each WT number is preserved in a merge just as each WT ID will still take you to the merged profile.  (I meant to test that some time when doing a merge, but don't think I did yet.)

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But...thinking harder...I see it's not just a question of the numbers, but of how many profiles there actually are, and how they are counted.

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I also don't know how many merges have been done over WT's history.  This year, I'd guess we will do around 300,000, but my impression is that the number of duplicates has increased over time, and in any case, in years past when there were fewer profiles, it only makes sense to imagine that there were fewer merges.

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Yes, the ancient WikiTree id is redirecting to the new one.

But suppose you have created Unameit-1234 under id 12345678. Afterwards you merge Unameit-1234 into Unamit-567, id 23456789. You are left with two ID-numbers and two ID-names, all redirecting to the same profile, so the numbers of profiles is one less, but the ID-number count is always the same.

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Yes, I see that (that's what I meant to say above ("thinking harder...")).  I'd still like to know how the count of profiles is done, though.

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"Go ask Aleš, I'm sure he'll know"

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Would you please add a tag for him to your question?

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Well I think we would need a new post before that, because we've completely drifted off-topic.