The Copenhagen City Archive, the Danish National Archives, the Brunak Group, and the BioHistory Group are working on a project called Link-Lives by which they want to establish a large-scale historical database of life courses and multi generational relationships. They state the data will be of high quality.
I am not convinced that it will be high quality data for a number of reasons, primarily these:
- Genealogists spend years trying to link one ancestor to another and then a machine is supposed to be able to "reconstruct life-courses and family-relations for (nearly) all individuals who have lived in Denmark 1787-1968."1
- This database is based on databases with indexes to original records, meaning the database is based on derivative sources.
Would you trust this machine to make your family tree for you? Let me know your thoughts in the comments section below.
Source references:
- University of Copenhagen (https://biohistory.ku.dk/lifecourses-database/ : accessed 9 February 2019), "Link-Lives: towards a Danish national historical life-course and multi-generational database 1787 - 1968."
- The image at the top is a snippet of my grandmother's family tree, which I have entered into my genealogy software.
