Iceland has a population of 320,000 people, which is roughly the same as Wigan or Coventry, except they’re spread over 40,000 square miles.
Iceland was a barren rock until a group of hardy Norse settlers arrived there in A.D. 874 and, since then, there hasn’t been movement of people to or from the island.
Because of this, there’s a fair amount of inter-relatedness. Apparently, it is an embarrassingly common occurrence to go to a family do, meet some distant relatives, and meet someone you had a fling with.
It’s a tale that’s told around the country. An Icelandic genealogy expert says “on average, if you pick two people on the street at random, you will find they are related 6 or 7 generations back.”
But thankfully for them, some University genealogy Lords have invented the Islendiga-App – “App of Icelanders.”
It’s an app that allows you to “bump phones” with a potential mate before doing the deed, just to double check you aren’t cousins. It features an “anti incest alarm” that beeps if you are too closely related.
The feature is called “Sifjaspellsspillir,” which directly translates to “Incest Destroyer,” though the team prefers the phrase “Incest Spoiler.”
In 1997, a company called deCODE, an Icelandic Biotech company, created something called the “Book of Icelanders.”
This book holds the genealogy of 95% of Icelanders from the last 300 years. It was built using census data, church records, family archives, and a host of other sources. It’s now an online database of residents and their family trees stretching back 1,200 years.
Iceland is probably the only country in the world where this would be possible because the first travellers to the volcanic rock found it empty, so they started the tree from scratch. They also have genealogy written in the Icelandic sagas dating back 1,000 years, and they boast the oldest parliament in the world.
So, they’ve been keeping pretty good records for a long, long time. Also, not too many people go over there to live compared with other countries.
The University of Iceland held a competition sponsored by deCODE to find the most interesting new use for this online Islendingabok, or Book of Icelanders, and so the app was born.
Their slogan is “bump the app before you bump in bed.”
It’s already had 4,000 plus downloads since launch, which doesn’t sound that huge, until you realise that’s more than 1% of the entire population.
