This repository holds the supplementary data files and source code for the following paper.

Venue: Historical Methods: A Journal of Quantitative and Interdisciplinary History

Title: Linking Scottish Vital Event Records Using Family Groups

Authors: Özgür Akgün¹, Alan Dearle¹, Graham Kirby¹, Eilidh Garrett², Tom Dalton¹, Peter Christen³, Chris Dibben⁴, Lee Williamson⁴

1. School of Computer Science, University of St Andrews
2. Department of Geography, University of Cambridge
3. Research School of Computer Science, The Australian National University
4. School of Geosciences, University of Edinburgh

Our algorithms make use of the M-tree data structure heavily. The following is a good reference about this data-structure.

• Ciaccia, P., M. Patella, and P. Zezula. 1997. M-Tree: an Efficient Access Method for Similarity Search in Metric Spaces. 23rd VLDB Conference, Athens, Greece. Morgan Kaufmann, 426–35.

The Wikipedia page for M-tree also contains useful information and some further references.

In the code-snapshot directory we provide source code that we used in our experiments for this paper. The script src/main/scripts/experiments/family_grouping.sh is the starting point of our experiments.