Can someone explain unconnected profiles and trees

Question

I found my father’s tree listed as an unconnected tree under category Unconnected Profiles, South Africa... this, according to the category description is a listing of categories that are not connected to the main tree, and need to be connected...

He is well connected in the linked sense to all his family... and he has a South African connection, in that he died in SA after living there for a good portion of his life.  He does not have SA roots though.

Please can someone explain in lay terms what this unconnection actually, because the help page is gobble de gook... with respect.

Comments

The real mystery is why Leslie Field’s tree is even listed under the Unconnected, South Africa category...

Answer 1

THE TREE is that part of the tree that has most of the European Royals attached. Being unconnected is not a problem but it would be really nice if we were all joined up. Best achieved but exploring the British connections, I suppose. Unconnected will encourage people who love making connections to do some of the work.

Comments

This means there are hundreds of extensive trees linking thousands of people together which simply are just not connected -  seems to me to be a misnomer if ever there was.  Perhaps the term Unconnected can be properly defined on the help page.

It’s amazing that I have entered a few hundred profiles all connected in some way or another, yet I have never come to merge a single one to an existing profile or the theoretical main tree...

Am I unique?  I would not have thought so with a robust and large Kent, England heritage.  Which is why I pose the question...

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Andrew, there are over 3,000 people who are estimated to have been born since 1 AD (which is the starting point for WikiTree) for every profile on WikiTree. Fortunately, that doesn't mean that you have to build your branch up to over 3,000 profiles before you can find a connection to the main tree. Sometimes, I've found a connection for an unconnected branch almost as soon as I start looking. But there have also been families which took me over a year to connect. (And you can believe that I was well and truly sick of looking by the time I finally did get them connected.)

Here's a chart I did up listing the estimated number of people born since 1 AD per WikiTree profile. People have been working hard to add profiles to WikiTree, so the ratio has dropped considerably since I started crunching the numbers, but it's still much harder for people to connect their branches than I would like it to be.

Answer 2

It just means that you haven’t found a connection with any other profiles on WikiTree.

Say your 2cousin had been uploading his tree here and he went to add you grandfather he would get a hit and would be able to connect the two trees. And it can spread the more people that are added, that’s the hope.

Comments

I think we need to define profile here... should that be profiles created by a third party?  No other profiles created by other people link to my family tree...

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Give them time.  Say you have a way-back-when ancestor who has 12 children.  You descend from one of the children.  That means there are 11 other children who had children who had children and eventually one of those descendants will connect up to the way-back-when ancestor.  'Your' tree is not 'yours' alone.  There are other descendants out there who will eventually connect to 'your' family tree as your 12th cousin x times removed.  The way-back-when ancestor is just as much 'theirs' as 'yours'.  And in fact, they may have created his profile!

Answer 3

It simply means that the tree your father is connected to is not connected to the largest contiguous tree on Wikitree yet.  

As C. Mackinnon said, that is the tree that happens to have most of the European royal families in it.

Comments

it would be interesting to see the reach of the largest contiguous tree mapped out and the thousands upon thousands of non-contiguous trees that are skirting around ‘unconnected’ in a graphic!  Me thinks a misnomer.  My definition would be something to the effect that my tree has no common profiles to any other profile creator... would that be correct?

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That would be awesome!

Not exactly correct per se, as I like to connect unconnected trees that other people have put on, and sometimes I successfully connect two separate profile creators' trees to each other, but not to the largest one.  (Yet)

I do however connect little trees to the big one quite often, and so do other people who like connecting, so maybe your father will be connected to it someday.

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I would like to see that as well!  The Tree certainly consists of a large number of contiguous clusters, from single isolated profiles to thousands of related people.  Out of the almost 19 million profiles, how many are in each the top ten largest clusters?

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The 10 largest unconnected branches sum up to 13,860 profiles.

Answer 4

Think of it like a giant jigsaw puzzle.

In theory, everyone in the world is related to everyone else in the world, so the completed puzzle will be one giant world tree.

As we work on the puzzle, there will be many large (and smaller) sections that are connected to each other, but still not yet connected to the big main tree (that giant connected section in the middle of the table).

Comments

And right now all your profiles are still in the box waiting to be connected to the big picture.

Answer 5

Andrew, if you look at, for example, the profile for Sir John Slade, First Baronet Slade, down at the bottom of the page, it says:

John is 20 degrees from Claude Monet, 22 degrees from Gigi Tanksley and  10 degrees from Victoria of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland on our single family tree. Check your connections or find your genealogical relationship with John.

Those three profiles*, in a sense, define being "connected": if a profile has a connection, however long and winding, to any of those profiles, then it is also connected to 15,169,742 other profiles. This is what we call "the main tree". 

There is a list of the next largest unconnected branches on the Connectors Chat page. As you can see, the next largest unconnected branch is several orders of magnitude smaller than the main tree. I have often fantasised about mapping the assorted unconnected branches relative to the main tree, but I eventually realised that the information needed to show them in relation to one another (aside from sheer size) would be the same information needed to connect them to one another, so if we're going to do the one, we might as well do the other.

As to why Leslie's profile had [[Category:South_Africa,_Unconnected_Profiles]] on it (I don't see it there now), there are so many unconnected profiles (3,661,082, as I write this) that lumping them all together into [[Category:Unconnected Profiles]] would make that category so large as to be unwieldy to work in. Besides that, most connectors specialise in particular places (not just because they prefer to work on their "home ground", but also because they tend to have more expertise in that area, and better access to resources which relate to it). Therefore, where we can, we sort those profiles by country, and sometimes by county/department/province/state, so that people who work in that area can find and connect those profiles. (Personally, I work most frequently in British Columbia and Nova Scotia, Canada.)

In cases where somebody was born in one country and moved to another, we normally link them to both categories, in case somebody can make a connection in either place. So, in Leslie's case, he should have been categorised under both [[Category:Kent, Unconnected Profiles]] and [[Category:South_Africa,_Unconnected_Profiles]], and if the person doing the categorising was paying attention to the biography, they should also have added [[Category:Southern Rhodesia, Unconnected Profiles]], which didn't exist, so I've just created it.

* Actually, only Queen Victoria stays the same from week to week. Claude Monet is this week's profile of the week, and Gigi Tanksley is this week's member of the week. Those change from week to week, but since all 15,169,742 profiles in the main tree are connected to one another, it pretty much doesn't matter who the defining profiles are.

Comments

A couple of additional comments:

I just tried charting the relative sizes of the main tree and the five largest unconnected branches. It was a complete waste of time. Even on my gargantumonitor, the second-largest branch was only large enough to warrant a single row of pixels beyond the axis. If I shrank the chart down small enough to post here, people wouldn't even be able to see the bars for the unconnected branches. I probably should have seen that coming, since even graphing the total number of unconnected profiles against the connected profiles shows that more than 80% of profiles are connected.

Also, here's the thread when we started talking about defining the unconnected branches from a couple of years ago: Unconnected Trees.

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Haha, I commented before reading far enough.  Greg, where do you get the data on unconnected branch sizes?  And, did you try a log scale on your graphic?

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To get the total number of profiles on WikiTree, hit the home page. Currently, it says, "Our tree includes 18,831,494 profiles", but it ticks up all the time. (I don't know how frequently the numbers are updated.)

To get the number of unconnected profiles, click on the Find menu on the top right of most screens on WikiTree, and select "Unconnected People". Currently, it says, "A total of 3,661,082 person profiles remain unconnected."

I try to keep the numbers current, and chart them on the Connectors Chat page, to help other connectors keep track of how things are going.

And, no, I haven't tried a log scale. My spreadsheet doesn't offer it, and I don't have specialised graphing software.

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Thanks Greg.  I get that the largest connected cluster is 15 million plus.  What's the size of the next biggest one, and so on?  You mentioned 'the five largest unconnected branches.'  Where can we see that data?

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There is a list of the 50 largest unconnected branches on the Connectors Chat page.

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Thanks, that is awesome!

The size drops below 1,000 profiles after #6!

Edit - Plain ol' MS Excel 2013.  Log scale:  Check the box on the 'Format Axis' window.  You can do the same with freebie Open Office.

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Howdy Greg and Herbert, pardon the interruption, but as I was reading down the mini-thread y'all have going here, a question built in my mind and I am wondering how far the data can be carried.

Basically, I have wondered about unconnected clusters for a long time. For a period after I joined I wondered how far back I would have to go to begin connecting with the Big Tree, turned out to be not very long which was kind of surprising. I live in an area of Texas where most of the families are related, much more so back in the 50s and 60s than today. So the talk of all the unconnected clusters made me wonder how many of them are created by some level of regional isolation.  Is there any way to tell if there is a higher percentage of localization of the members of a particular cluster?  Or perhaps better stated, do any of the unconnected groups cluster to specific geographic regions?  If the data is not there for such an extrapolation, no problem.  Just a question that popped into my mind while reading this very intereting thread.  Thanks

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I have noticed, as I have been adding branches to the list on the Connectors Chat page (and on the Let others know what locations you are working on page), that some unconnected branches are very limited geographically. 

I have also noticed that some branches are almost entirely composed of the same name, as if somebody had researched their family, but only traced out the father, then the father's father, and so on, and completely neglected any maternal links.

In cases like those, I wonder if they'd be relatively simple to connect, simply by seeking out spouses, spouses of siblings, etc. If somebody is only paying attention to family from the immediate locale (or in their paternal line), then it would be easy to miss possible links.

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When I saw the size of the unconnected clusters, and the very loooooong tail on their distribution, the first thing that came to mind was GEDCOM.  People drop in their 1,000-person import, and it remains unconnected for some period of time before coalescing into the main tree.  Many get abandoned when the importer decides WikiTree is not for him or her.  Intuitively, you'd expect to see a lot of them in that state at any particular instant.  Greg's same-name observation seems consistent. Are there other clues in the data to support or refute that theory?

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Yes, Herbert, I've seen cases like that, where somebody joined WikiTree, imported a GEDCOM, stuck around for maybe a couple of weeks, and then disappeared. I think that must have happened particularly frequently when a GEDCOM got disconnected during the upload process. I can see why it would be extremely demotivating to upload a family tree that you've been working on for ages, and then when you go to look at it, even your own parents don't show up as connected to your profile. (Actually, part of my motivation for starting the Lost and Found Project was the hope that, if we manage to put people's disconnected branches back together and connect them to the main tree, that might motivate them to come back.)

I've also seen cases where somebody clearly stuck around for quite a while, and may even still be active on WikiTree, but still haven't managed to connect to the main tree yet. I know it took me months to get my branch connected, and I have to admit that there were times when I was so discouraged that I was tempted to give it up. But somebody else finally made the link, and then I got all fired up again, and since then, I've managed to make at least 6 other connections between my branch and the main tree (most recently, through Douglas McCurdy).

And, sadly, I've seen branches which look as if the people who created them were deliberately trying to avoid being connected to the main tree, or letting anybody else make any changes to anything.

Some of the signs which make me think that:

• all the profiles have the privacy set to Public or higher
• all the names are "Anonymous" or "Unknown"
• all the first names are initials
• no dates, anywhere in the branch 
• no locations, anywhere in the branch

So there are lots of reasons why branches remain unconnected. 

Answer 6

May I thank everybody who responded and commented.

I am left wondering why the connection to the big tree is so important as to create categories for unconnected individuals and trees.  I guess in some respects it may attract 'connectors', but at the end of the day, if a connection is ever to occur in my unique family tree its really going to come through expanding the tree until, eventually, a connection is made.

Comments

In the English version of Shostakovich's comic opera ''Chernomushki'', the young couple asks the supervisor for electricity in their apartment, and is told "if you want to be connected well, you must be very well connected". Maybe that is true on WikiTree too

Answer 7

There is an Unconnected: FAQ page to help answer questions like this.