Why your true love may be just six miles away
WHEN it comes to finding the love of your life, there’s no exact science or magic formula to make the search easier.
But at least in Britain you probably don’t have to look too far from home.
A study has found that members of the baby boomer generation typically married someone who lived just six miles away.
This compared with Americans who married someone from 60 miles away on average, and Europeans who found their soulmate 18 miles from home.
The largest scientific ‘family tree’ ever created – looking at 13million people across the US and Europe and historical records spanning 300 years – has revealed that Britons were the most likely to fall for the boy or girl down the road.
Even after the invention of the railway which allowed for much easier travel, most Britons still married someone from within a six-mile radius of where they were born. The study looked at couples born as recently as 1950, during the post-Second World War ‘baby boomer’ generation.
In the US, people married partners from within a six-mile radius in 1750, prior to the Industrial Revolution. But as transport links improved, the distance grew. Americans born in 1950 found their partners within 60 miles of where they were born on average.
And people in Europe searched three times as far as those in Britain to find their partner – about 18 miles away.
The findings come from a family tree spanning 11 generations and historical records from 1650 to 1950. Trying to explain why Britons moved around less, Dr Yaniv Erlich, a co-author of the study from Columbia University, said: ‘It might be social norms, better economic opportunities in the vicinity of their homes, or even the fact that it is an island.’
Researchers trawled profiles from a genealogy website to create the largest, scientifically-vetted family tree to date. It offers fresh insights into centuries of marriage and migration in Europe and North America.
Before 1850 marrying in the family was common – to someone who was on average a fourth cousin.
But the advent of rail travel, which came to the US and Europe between 1820 and 1875, enabled people to marry partners from further afield, as did other faster modes of transport such as the motor car.
Dr Erlich said: ‘Through the hard work of many genealogists curious about their family history, we crowd-sourced an enormous family tree and came up with something unique. We hope this dataset can be useful to scientists researching a range of other topics.’
The study, published in the journal Science, also found that women in Europe and North America have migrated more than men over the last 300 years. However when men did migrate, they travelled significantly further on average.