Drori, Offer. "Building a National Family Tree", Proceedings of the 24th IAJGS - International Conference on Jewish Genealogy (Jerusalem, ISRAEL, July 4-9, 2004)

(114) our family. My grandfather Mordechai Salomon was the grandson of Yoel Moshe Salomon, and like some of my relatives I used to draw family trees and trace my past. In 1987, in the course of my work at SHAAM - Information Systems, the need arose to provide users of the service with information on the family trees of the entire population of Israel, for tax purposes. This was a challenge unlike the single-family tree I had dealt with hitherto: here were millions of people, and I needed to think and plan how best to build a family tree on such a scale. The lecture that follows will describe the structure of the national family tree, the way it was planned and built, and also the services obtainable from it. The information presented in the system is available to its users (workers in tax departments) for their work purposes, but is not open for private research. According to the law (Population Census and the Protection of Privacy), a person is entitled to receive information about himself or herself, but not about other people (apart from name and address). Hence the family tree that was developed in the system is not open to public at large, according to present-day restrictions