In 2005 , the Guinness Book of World Records recognized the Confucius genealogical line as thelongest class tree diagram in account , with 86 commemorate generations over 2,500 years . The Chinese philosopher ( 551 to 479 BCE ) is thought to have 3 million descendants all over the world . Two million of them are show ( although not DNA - tested ) in " The Confucius Genealogy , " an 80 - volume set published in 2009 [ source : Zhou ] .
But what about the bounteous crime syndicate Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree ? A British man mention Roy Blackmore is often accredit with the heavy family Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree filled out the old - fashioned way , through year of legwork and exhaustive research ( mostly on newspaper , without the Internet ) . He claims to have work on his tree diagram five hours a Clarence Day for 28 years , eventually finding more than 9,000 ancestors over 1,500 years and 45 multiplication [ generator : Simpson ] .
But all recreational genealogist , no matter how painstaking and impressive their effort , will forevermore be trump by the work of the " genomehacker , " Yaniv Erlich , and his team of investigator from the Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research at MIT . They ’ve amassed a family tree diagram with an dumbfounding 13 million people from the preceding 500 long time or so who have the same transmitted line . And they did it by harnessing the big businessman of social media .
Erlich and his team did n’t induct this project just to see how big they could make this worldwide kinsperson Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree . Their intent was ( and is ) to take apart the genic information in an passing large family ( which is what this chemical group of 13 million people is , as strange as it may seem ) . They wanted to examine , among other things , longevity , fertility andmigration patterns , and the bigger the pool , the dear . They patently were n’t about to start digging through 500 old age of church building records , obituaries and parentage announcements , and trying to recruit large fellowship would n’t be worth the tremendous effort . They ’d get maybe a few thousand participants , which just was n’t enough . So they reverse to a source that late generations of genealogists could only stargaze about , and it turned out to have a huge payoff .
Geni.com is the largest family tree - focused societal web , with 43 million public profiles available to anyone who ’d care to check them out [ source : Ledford ] . The profiles generally hold back a name , nascence and death date , location and sometimes photos . Erlich ’s team used the info to unite the profiles into family Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree — some topped out at a few thousand , but one grew to 13 million . The researcher then spent a year organizing the data and ultimately offer their finding to the world at FamiLinx , a " database of crowd - sourced family tree " [ source : FamiLinx ] .
As more and more multitude get turned on to crowd - sourced genealogy and accede their entropy to site like Geni.com and FamiLinx , it ’s not hard to imagine a solar day when 13 million might finish up seeming like a small family Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree .
