SOFTWARE FOR CONSTRUCTING AND VERIFYING PEDIGREES WITHIN LARGE GENEALOGIES AND AN APPLICATION TO THE OLD ORDER AMISH OF LANCASTER COUNTY

This paper describes PedHunter, a software package that facilitates cr eation and verification of pedigrees within large genealogies. A frequ ent problem in medical genetics is to connect distant relatives with a pedigree. PedHunter uses methods from graph theory to solve two versi ons of the pedigree connection problem for genealogies as well as othe r pedigree analysis problems. The pedigrees are produced by PedHunter as files in LINKAGE format ready for linkage analysis. PedHunter uses a relational database of genealogy data, with tables in specified form at, for all calculations. The functionality and utility of PedHunter a re illustrated by examples using the Amish Genealogy Database (AGDB), which was created for the Old Order Amish community of Lancaster Count y, Pennsylvania.