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Including a new preface by the author, Irish Migrants in the Canadas probes beyond the aggregate statistics of most studies of the migration process. Bruce Elliott traces the genealogies, movements, landholding strategies, and economic lives of 775 families of Irish immigrants who came to Canada between 1815 and 1855 from County Tipperary, Ireland. He follows his subjects not only from Ireland to Canada but in their subsequent movements within North America. His work has important implications for current discussions of nineteenth-century society in Ireland, Canada, and the United States.

InThe Perraults, Oded Rabinovitch takes the fascinating eponymous literary and scientific family as an entry point into the complex and rapidly changing world of early modern France. Today, the Perraults are best remembered for their canonical fairy tales, such as \"Cinderella\" and \"Puss in Boots,\" most often attributed to Charles Perrault, one of the brothers. While the writing of fairy tales may seem a frivolous enterprise, it was, in fact, linked to the cultural revolution of the seventeenth century, which paved the way for the scientific revolution, the rise of \"national literatures,\" and the early Enlightenment. Rabinovitch argues that kinship networks played a crucial, yet unexamined, role in shaping the cultural and intellectual ferment of the day, which in turn shaped kinship and the social history of the family. Through skillful reconstruction of the Perraults' careers and networks, Rabinovitch portrays the world of letters as a means of social mobility. He complicates our understanding of prominent institutions, such as the Academy of Sciences, Versailles, and the salons, as well as the very notions of authorship and court capitalism.The Perraultsshows us that institutions were not simply rigid entities, embodying or defining intellectual or literary styles such as Cartesianism, empiricism, or the purity of the French language. Rather, they emerge as nodes that connect actors, intellectual projects, family strategies, and practices of writing.

Human relationships, as documented by family trees, can elucidate the heritability of a host of medical and biological parameters. Kaplanis et al. collected 86 million publicly available profiles from a crowd-sourced genealogy website and used them to examine the genetic architecture of human longevity and migration patterns (see the Perspective by Lussier and Keinan). Various models of inheritance suggested that life span is predominantly attributable to additive genetic effects, with a smaller component from dominant genetic inheritance. The data also suggested that relatedness between individuals is less attributable to advances in human transportation than to cultural changes. Science , this issue p. 171 ; see also p. 153 Crowdsourced genealogy data are useful for testing genetic hypotheses. Family trees have vast applications in fields as diverse as genetics, anthropology, and economics. However, the collection of extended family trees is tedious and usually relies on resources with limited geographical scope and complex data usage restrictions. We collected 86 million profiles from publicly available online data shared by genealogy enthusiasts. After extensive cleaning and validation, we obtained population-scale family trees, including a single pedigree of 13 million individuals. We leveraged the data to partition the genetic architecture of human longevity and to provide insights into the geographical dispersion of families. We also report a simple digital procedure to overlay other data sets with our resource.

Important knowledge about the determinants of complex human phenotypes can be obtained from the estimation of heritability, the fraction of phenotypic variation in a population that is determined by genetic factors. Here, we make use of extensive phenotype data in Iceland, long-range phased genotypes, and a population-wide genealogical database to examine the heritability of 11 quantitative and 12 dichotomous phenotypes in a sample of 38,167 individuals. Most previous estimates of heritability are derived from family-based approaches such as twin studies, which may be biased upwards by epistatic interactions or shared environment. Our estimates of heritability, based on both closely and distantly related pairs of individuals, are significantly lower than those from previous studies. We examine phenotypic correlations across a range of relationships, from siblings to first cousins, and find that the excess phenotypic correlation in these related individuals is predominantly due to shared environment as opposed to dominance or epistasis. We also develop a new method to jointly estimate narrow-sense heritability and the heritability explained by genotyped SNPs. Unlike existing methods, this approach permits the use of information from both closely and distantly related pairs of individuals, thereby reducing the variance of estimates of heritability explained by genotyped SNPs while preventing upward bias. Our results show that common SNPs explain a larger proportion of the heritability than previously thought, with SNPs present on Illumina 300K genotyping arrays explaining more than half of the heritability for the 23 phenotypes examined in this study. Much of the remaining heritability is likely to be due to rare alleles that are not captured by standard genotyping arrays.

The recent genealogical history of human populations is a complex mosaic formed by individual migration, large-scale population movements, and other demographic events. Population genomics datasets can provide a window into this recent history, as rare traces of recent shared genetic ancestry are detectable due to long segments of shared genomic material. We make use of genomic data for 2,257 Europeans (in the Population Reference Sample [POPRES] dataset) to conduct one of the first surveys of recent genealogical ancestry over the past 3,000 years at a continental scale. We detected 1.9 million shared long genomic segments, and used the lengths of these to infer the distribution of shared ancestors across time and geography. We find that a pair of modern Europeans living in neighboring populations share around 2-12 genetic common ancestors from the last 1,500 years, and upwards of 100 genetic ancestors from the previous 1,000 years. These numbers drop off exponentially with geographic distance, but since these genetic ancestors are a tiny fraction of common genealogical ancestors, individuals from opposite ends of Europe are still expected to share millions of common genealogical ancestors over the last 1,000 years. There is also substantial regional variation in the number of shared genetic ancestors. For example, there are especially high numbers of common ancestors shared between many eastern populations that date roughly to the migration period (which includes the Slavic and Hunnic expansions into that region). Some of the lowest levels of common ancestry are seen in the Italian and Iberian peninsulas, which may indicate different effects of historical population expansions in these areas and/or more stably structured populations. Population genomic datasets have considerable power to uncover recent demographic history, and will allow a much fuller picture of the close genealogical kinship of individuals across the world.

The police can access your online family-tree research—and use it to investigate your relatives The 24 April 2018 arrest of Joseph James DeAngelo as the alleged Golden State Killer, suspected of more than a dozen murders and 50 rapes in California, has raised serious societal questions related to personal privacy. The break in the case came when investigators compared DNA recovered from victims and crime scenes to other DNA profiles searchable in a free genealogical database called GEDmatch. This presents a different situation from the analysis of DNA of individuals arrested or convicted of certain crimes, which has been collected in the U.S. National DNA Index System (NDIS) for forensic purposes since 1989. The search of a nonforensic database for law enforcement purposes has caught public attention, with many wondering how common such searches are, whether they are legal, and what consumers can do to protect themselves and their families from prying police eyes. Investigators are already rushing to make similar searches of GEDmatch in other cases, making ethical and legal inquiry into such use urgent.

In The Privileges of Death: Images of Immortality in Verse Inscriptions of the Hellenistic and Greco-Roman Periods Andrzej Wypustek provides a study of various forms of poetic heroization that became increasingly widespread in Greek funerary epigram in the 1st-3rd centuries AD.

In the context of ancestral reconstruction, a phylogeny is often treated as though it were a known quantity (with Bayesian approaches being an important exception). Because there can be an enormous number of phylogenies that are nearly equally effective at explaining the data, reducing the subset of phylogenies supported by the data to a single representative, or point estimate, can be a convenient and sometimes necessary simplifying assumption. [...]there are several web server-based applications that allow investigators to use ML methods for ancestral reconstruction of different character types without having to install any software.

Koreans are known for their keen interest in genealogy and inherited ancestral status. Yet today's ordinary Korean would be hard pressed to explain the whereabouts of ancestors before the twentieth century. WithA Family of No Prominence, Eugene Y. Park gives us a remarkable account of a nonelite family, that of Pak Tŏkhwa and his descendants (which includes the author). Spanning the early modern and modern eras over three centuries (1590-1945), this narrative of one family of thechungin class of people is a landmark achievement. What we do know of the chungin, or \"middle people,\" of Korea largely comes from profiles of wealthy, influential men, frequently cited as collaborators with Japanese imperialists, who went on to constitute the post-1945 South Korean elite. This book highlights many rank-and-filechungin who, despite being better educated than most Koreans, struggled to survive. We follow Pak Tŏkhwa's descendants as they make inroads into politics, business, and culture. Yet many members' refusal to link their family histories and surnames to royal forebears, as most other Koreans did, sets them apart, and facilitates for readers a meaningful discussion of identity, modernity, colonialism, memory, and historical agency.

Principal components analysis, PCA, is a statistical method commonly used in population genetics to identify structure in the distribution of genetic variation across geographical location and ethnic background. However, while the method is often used to inform about historical demographic processes, little is known about the relationship between fundamental demographic parameters and the projection of samples onto the primary axes. Here I show that for SNP data the projection of samples onto the principal components can be obtained directly from considering the average coalescent times between pairs of haploid genomes. The result provides a framework for interpreting PCA projections in terms of underlying processes, including migration, geographical isolation, and admixture. I also demonstrate a link between PCA and Wright's f(st) and show that SNP ascertainment has a largely simple and predictable effect on the projection of samples. Using examples from human genetics, I discuss the application of these results to empirical data and the implications for inference.