The following information is from death records at the Town Hall of Shelburne, Franklin County, Massachusetts. Persons who died in Shelburne, or last resided in Shelburne, or are buried in Shelburne, are included, along with a few deaths from earlier years.

3067 deaths in 1753 trees, 1910-2002:
Death records for closely related deceased family members (spouses, siblings, parents and children) were grouped into family trees, using only the information available in the death records. Among 3067 death records, 1319 had no closely related family members; these were put into 1319 "trees" of size = 1. There were 482 persons with one other family member; these were put into 241 trees of size = 2. Similarly, 249 persons were put into 83 trees of size = 3. The same procedure was followed for all 3067 deaths.

The largest tree had 68 deceased individuals related by birth or marriage; these were put into a single tree of size = 68. The next largest trees had size = 54, 42, and 39. The number of trees by tree size, and the number of deceased persons by tree size, are plotted in the next two figures.

Both plots have a linear relationship on a log-log plot (logarithmic scales on both the x and y axis). To avoid the difficulty of plotting zeros on a logarithmic scale, the largest trees were distributed over empty adjacent values of tree size. For example, there were no trees of size = 13. The 3 trees of size = 12 were plotted as 1.5 trees of size 12 and 1.5 trees of size = 13. The number of trees and the number of deaths vary inversely as the 2.55 and 1.55 power of tree size, respectively. That is,

The following files list surnames in the 434 family trees which have size greater than 1. The 1319 "trees" of size 1 are excluded. "deaths" is the number of registered deaths of persons known to be related, however indirectly, by birth or marriage. "treemame" identifies the surnames of the related families. (For married women and widows, the father's surname and not the husband's, is used.)