Families identifies family and kin relationships in a virtual population generated by VirtualPop. Individual identification numbers (IDs) are the keys to retrieve information on individuals and relationships. The package includes a few basic functions to navigate the virtual population database. They retrieve information on mothers, fathers, partners, children, siblings, aunts, uncles and cousins. They also retrieve information on grandparents, great-grandparents and their offspring. The individual information is limited to date of birth, date of death, and IDs of partner, mother, father and children.

The multi-generation virtual population offers opportunities to map social (family) networks and to adopt different perspectives on population, including the perspective of a child or an elderly person. The vignette Families_Virtual describes the package and illustrates its use. HTML and pdf versions of the vignette are in folder Families/doc.

To install the package from CRAN, type in the R window:

    install.packages ("Families")

To install the package from GitHub, use:

    library(devtools)
    devtools::install_github("willekens/Families")