Probabilistic linkage of vital event records in Scotland using familial groups

We report on the assembly of longitudinal data from Scottish birth, death and marriage records representing eighteen million individuals. An experimental approach based on familial groups starts by gathering parents and their siblings into bundles with the aim of (as near of possible) partitioning the certificates into familial groups. This may be achieved by bundling marriage and birth certificates according to a signature derived from their attributes. This is similar to but different from blocking used in most entity resolution schemes where certificates of one kind are gathered together. We have experimented with these techniques using hand coded data from an historic Scottish dataset as a gold standard for comparison. In this paper we will report on our techniques and some preliminary results from our experiments.