Robert C. Gunderson (6 December 1931 – 23 June 2003) was an American genealogist. He was the first supervisor of the Royalty Identification Unit of the

Genealogical Society of Utah FamilySearch is a nonprofit organization and website offering genealogical records, education, and software. It is operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (LDS Church), and is closely connected with the church's Family Histo ...

and introduced the term ''

Pedigree Collapse In genealogy, pedigree collapse describes how reproduction between two individuals who share an ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it could otherwise be. Robert C. Gunderson c ...

''.

Career

Robert Gunderson began his work with the Genealogical Society of Utah in 1964. He started the Royalty Identification Unit in 1972 and served as Senior Royalty Research Specialist. Among other projects, he and his assistants attempted to identify all the descendants of Edward IV of England. In 1980, Gunderson first propounded the concept of ''Pedigree Collapse'' at the World Conference on Records in

Salt Lake City Salt Lake City (often shortened to Salt Lake and abbreviated as SLC) is the capital and most populous city of Utah, United States. It is the seat of Salt Lake County, the most populous county in Utah. With a population of 200,133 in 2020, th ...

Utah Utah ( , ) is a state in the Mountain West subregion of the Western United States. Utah is a landlocked U.S. state bordered to its east by Colorado, to its northeast by Wyoming, to its north by Idaho, to its south by Arizona, and to it ...

. In his address, ''Connecting Your Pedigree Into Royal, Noble and Medieval Families'', he described how reproduction between two individuals who share a common ancestor causes the number of distinct ancestors in the family tree of their offspring to be smaller than it would otherwise be.

References

Other sources

* 1931 births 2003 deaths American genealogists Genealogy and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints Latter Day Saints from Utah 20th-century American historians American male non-fiction writers 20th-century American male writers {{US-academic-bio-stub