This site is built from two things: stories and receipts. The “receipts” live in my working genealogy database, and one way I keep myself honest is by periodically exporting a GEDCOM and asking: what does the tree actually contain?
Below is a snapshot of the current GEDCOM export.
Tree size (current export)#
- Individuals: 27,840
- Families: 9,307
- Sources: 1,040
- Media objects: 1,555
(Counts are taken directly from the GEDCOM record types.)
Top surname clusters#
Counting surnames as they appear in GEDCOM NAME entries (which can include alternate names), the largest clusters are:
- Wheeler — 1,936
- Woodbury — 997
- Worcester — 350
- Tuttle — 270
- Baker — 256
- Rice — 250
- Tolles — 244
- Smith — 227
- Beasecker — 209
- Dodge — 199
These counts are useful not just for “what’s big,” but for deciding what to prioritize for cleanup and story releases.
A real-world problem: surname variants#
One thing GEDCOM exports reveal immediately is how often a surname splits into variants (spacing, capitalization, indexer choices, etc.). A few examples from this export:
McGinty / Ginty variants#
- McGinty — 89
- Mc Ginty — 5
- Mcginty — 4
- Ginty — 21
Mackenzie variants#
- Mackenzie — 106
- MacKenzie — 7
This matters because it affects:
- tag pages (e.g.,
/tags/mcginty/vs/tags/ginty/) - search relevance
- duplicate detection
Normalizing variants is one of the fastest ways to make the public site feel “clean.”
Geography: where the paper trail clusters#
Place fields are messy by nature (“England” vs “Town, County, State”), but even with inconsistencies you can see strong hubs.
Birthplace signals (high-level)#
By occurrences in birth place entries, the strongest hubs include:
- Massachusetts (especially Essex + Middlesex County towns)
- England (often recorded generically as “England”)
- Midwest clusters: Indiana, Ohio, Illinois
- A notable cluster in Poplacin, Mazowieckie, Poland (shows up frequently)
Death place signals#
Top death places include:
- England (again, often generic)
- Beverly, Essex, Massachusetts
- Chicago, Cook, Illinois
- Concord, Middlesex, Massachusetts
- Poplacin, Mazowieckie, Poland
This helps me decide which “place hubs” deserve dedicated pages and which tags should be curated.
Data quality checks (because genealogy runs on receipts)#
A few cleanup flags surfaced in this export:
- 24 records where the first captured birth-like year is later than the first death-like year
(usually a swapped date, wrong attachment, or a merge artifact) - Duplicate “historical/royalty” profiles (common after importing/merging)
- Place formatting inconsistency (“England” vs “Town, County, Country”)
None of these are fatal. They’re just the normal maintenance work of a long-running tree.
What I’m doing next#
- Normalize the biggest surname variants (McGinty/Ginty; Mackenzie/MacKenzie; etc.).
- Standardize places for the biggest hubs (Essex/Middlesex MA; Chicago IL; key Ireland/Poland locations).
- Use the cleaned dataset to drive weekly story releases by branch.
If you’re connected to any of these families—or if you notice a place/surname split that should be merged—please reach out via Contact.