Family statistics

[dochines]

I was looking at some of the features of my family tree maker programme that I do not usually look at and came across the analysis of the average life span of those in my tree

My sample size is now considerable with over 20,000 entries in the extended tree and the date of birth range from the earliest in 1425 to 2008. There are numerous deaths in childhood throught the 18th and 19th century and a few reaching 100 or more

I was suprised to find the average life span to be 58 years and 4 months.I have no idea whether or not this is what to expect or whether it is greater than would be expected, as I at first thought.

Would other members who are able like to do a similar analysis in their programmes just to see what other average life spans we can find and lets post a few for comparison.

dochines

 

[whiteys22@activ8.net.au]

Hi
I have family tree maker and looking at my stat's i have 1167 names with av life of 54.5 years.

buggs

 

[dochines]

Thanks for that information which is broadly comparable to mine. We need to encourage a few others to do the same so we can establish a normal range. I am not suggesting any competition just data collection to collect a trend and see the variations.

dochines

 

[Hugo Donnachie]

An interesting use of our data.

Is there an accepted way of coping with people where there is no date of death? This becomes important if there are many loose ends in your tree.

I don't know where to turn to for overall guidance on this.

 

[dochines]

You make an important point . I have assumed,but perhaps should check with the company, that my FTM programme calculated the age of each individual in order to arrive at the average life expectancy. If a death date or for that matter a birth date is not recorded it is not possible to calculate that individual's longevity and so would be excluded from the statistics.

Some on line programmes assume an individual to be living if the date of birth is more that 120 years ago and there is no entry for a date of death.

Some people make a lot of use of Before, After or Between to estimate dates

This can be helpful when searching for an individual but could well distort the statistics if used too much.

I do not know of a standard best practice approach to this but perhaps there are those who can advise us further

dochines

 

[dochines]

Did you spot my deliberate mistake in my last posting.?

I should of course have said

If an individual is less than 120yrs old they are treated as living if no death date has been entered.


dochines

 

[duckweed]

My Family Tree maker does give an average but I decided to discount it as I don't have enough death dates. Many surname sites and Ancestry do give averages for certain surnames. I know my husbands surname suggests his family does well genetically, well above average and my own research backs that because even those who are in occupations which are high risk they seem to manage to reach old age and there are many men and women who live well into their 80s all through the 19thc. Part must be luck as cholera seems to have passed them by. Quite a few children didn't make it past 2 years but most who did lived to a ripe old age. Be interesting research for a geneticist to look at a particular family and compare it with their DNA don't you think?