Networks: Teasing out the missing links.

GENEALOGY; DESCENT (Kinship); FAMILY archives; AUXILIARY sciences of history; FAMILY history (Sociology); GENEALOGICAL libraries; DESCENT groups; INTERGENERATIONAL relations

The article discusses the significance of dendrogram in tracing a person's hierarchical structure of a family tree in the U.S. Previously, mankind genetically connected their siblings through parents, to first cousins by their grandparents and onwards and upwards. It reveals that the basic family tree describes a highly unrealistic, insular populations and no other social connections exists but with the dendrogram, one can incorporate a more social and random aspect into the model by adding lateral connections between nodes in the tree that share a common ancestor.