This article highlights the usefulness of family trees for visualizing and understanding changing patterns of kin dispersion over time. Such spatial patterns are important in gauging how families influence outcomes such as health and social mobility. The article describes how rapidly growing families, originally from England, dispersed over the US North and established hubs where they originally settled that lasted hundreds of years, even as they repeated the process moving West. Fathers lived much closer to their adult sons in 1850 than they do today and many more had an adult son within a radius of 30 miles. Big Data from genealogical websites is now available to map large numbers of families. Comparing one such data set with the US Census of 1880 shows that the native-born population is well represented, but there are not as many foreign born or African Americans in these data sets. Pedigrees become less and less representative the further back in time they go because they only include lines that have survived into the present. Despite these and other limitations, Big Data make it possible to study family spatial dispersion going back many generations and to map past spatial connections in a wider variety of historical contexts and at a scale never before possible.

中文翻译：

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不断变化的家庭空间：家谱学方法

本文强调了家谱在可视化和理解随时间变化的亲属分布模式方面的有用性。这种空间模式对于衡量家庭如何影响健康和社会流动性等结果非常重要。这篇文章描述了最初来自英格兰的快速增长的家庭如何分散在美国北部，并在他们最初定居的地方建立了持续数百年的中心，即使他们重复了向西迁移的过程。1850 年，父亲们的生活距离他们成年儿子的距离比今天更近，更多的人在 30 英里半径范围内有一个成年儿子。现在可以使用来自家谱网站的大数据来绘制大量家庭地图。将一组这样的数据与 1880 年的美国人口普查进行比较表明，本土出生的人口具有很好的代表性，但这些数据集中没有那么多外国出生或非裔美国人。随着时间的推移，谱系变得越来越不具有代表性，因为它们只包括幸存到现在的谱系。尽管存在这些和其他限制，但大数据使研究可追溯至多代的家庭空间分布以及在更广泛的历史背景和前所未有的规模上绘制过去的空间联系成为可能。