… at a snail’s pace…
The Legal Genealogist occasionally indulges in the fantasy of advanced genealogist status.
You know the kind of status… the kind that says, loudly, “I can trace all my ancestors back however-many generations!”
Until I take the time to do a reality check.
And … sigh… realize however-many generations ain’t very many.
And … sigh… how very far I have to go.
I mean, seriously, think about it: in just about 250 years, give or take depending on how long-tailed a generation might be, we’re all going to have somewhere around 1,000 people in our direct ancestral lines. Go ahead and count ’em: two parents, plus four grandparents, plus eight great grandparents and so on. Even this FamilySearch chart is daunting — and it’s only to the third great grandparent level.
And by the time we hit seventh great grandparents? There’d be 1,022 slots on that family tree chart.1
Oh, yeah, sure, some of ’em will be duplicates: we all probably have what’s called pedigree collapse — because of cousins marrying cousins somewhere, an individual or a couple ends up occupying more than one place in the family tree.2
But that’s still a lot of slots to fill.
So… how’m I doing?
Sigh… better than I was the last time I did this3… but at this rate, I’m going to need another lifetime or two.
| Generation | Number | ID’d by 2012 | ID’d by 2021 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parents | 2 | 2 | 2 |
| Grandparents | 4 | 4 | 4 |
| Great grandparents | 8 | 8 | 8 |
| 2nd great grandparents | 16 | 14 | 15 |
| 3rd great grandparents | 32 | 22 | 25 |
| 4th great grandparents | 64 | 25 | 41 |
| 5th great grandparents | 128 | 25 | 36 |
| 6th great grandparents | 256 | 16 | 24 |
| 7th great grandparents | 512 | 10 | 13 |
| Total | 1022 | 126 (12.3%) | 166 (16.2%) |
Yeah… in nine years I’ve added another not-quite four percent. So with 83.8% to go, it should only take me, oh, give or take, 188 years or so.
It’s progress, for sure.
But at a snail’s pace.
Cite/link to this post: Judy G. Russell, “Progress…,” The Legal Genealogist (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : posted 6 Nov 2021).
SOURCES
- See FamilySearch Research Wiki (https://www.familysearch.org/learn/wiki/), “Genealogy Numbering Systems (National Institute),” rev. 13 May 2019. Actually 1023 slots if we count ourselves… ↩
- Wikipedia (https://www.wikipedia.com), “Pedigree collapse,” rev. 13 Sep 2021. ↩
- See Judy G. Russell, “More lost than found,” The Legal Genealogist, posted 18 Aug 2012 (https://www.legalgenealogist.com/blog : accessed 6 Nov 2021). ↩
Then I guess I should consider myself “lucky”. I and my wife together only have 60 direct ancestors I can find. The records from Ukraine and Romania only go back to the mid 18th century.
But then I have their siblings and their siblings descendants – about 2000 of them – many of whose stories won’t be told unless I uncover them.
Records loss is sure going to be a stumbling block for lots of us… but yeah, expanding to the extended family does give us plenty to work on, doesn’t it?
I recently pulled my typed-pedigree sheet binders down from the shelf. I had not looked at them in 30 years, what with databases and such. I found a prehistoric proof argument. (Wrong, but the reasoning was sound… Just didn’t have enough data…) I also realized that my “add” rate in that time is something closer to 10% for me. The low-hanging fruit is wonderful, but I sure wish I had had better success along the way.
Or there was more of it! Sigh…
Wait: You actually keep a table and update it? Wow. I have no idea what my numbers are.
You can run an Ahnentafel report in your genealogy software and then just count!
Your post prompted me to look at my results. I am the first immigrant to this country and all my known ancestors are English. This is both a curse and a blessing. It is a curse because I have fewer DNA matches than those with US ancestry but it is a blessing because in many cases the records are there to take me back to 7th GG and beyond. My total ID’d at all generations up to 7th GG are 23% of possible.
My one confirmed English line I can trace way back thanks to those great records. My US southern lines? Not so much…
I think I last did mine around the time that you did. I have so much endogamy in my tree, parts are disgustingly easy. I mean, 7 of my 8 great-grandparents are kin to somebody “on the other side!” Go back another generation, and there’s only 14 unique individuals!
Thanks for the reminder. I’ll do a check later today.
BTW, do you have any Russells in TN? Hubby has a nightmare Russell brick-wall!
Endogamy can really gunk things up, can’t it? And no Russells. (a) It’s a married name. (b) It was anglicied from the Italian Russelli!
I haven’t kept track over the years, but I just ran the numbers and I’m at 25.9% through 7th GG. Over the past year and a half I have been able to add a surprising number of German ancestors, thanks to Archion.
Sigh… I keep waiting for Archion to add records from my areas of Germany… nope. Not yet.
DNA Painter’s Ancestral Trees feature allows uploading your GEDcom and then will show you the percentage of completeness of that tree. I like it because I don’t have to do the math!
I just ran the numbers and I seem to have 95% of the 7th generation, seven still missing. Three are 18th-century Irish, pre-Famine. Two are blank because I don’t know which of three brothers (& wives) the parents are; I do know the paternal grandparents who are the 8th generation and off the chart. Two are because an ancestor was illegitimate; his mother’s name is on record but not his father’s, so no clue about the father’s parents.
I absolutely can’t imagine having that many well-documented folks in my tree. Names as a theory? Maybe. Well-documented? Sigh… not with my southern US folks…
Congratulations to Judy and all those who have done that well. It takes a lot of work. Mine are uneven. Some German areas I can’t get back beyond the immigrant – 4 generations back. With maybe some records tucked away somewhere and maybe they were all destroyed in the 2 World Wars plus other conflicts since before Napoleon. Others I am back beyond Charlemagne, but my interest lies elsewhere.
With my immigrants all about 4 generations back I have been more occupied with their sibling lines and the other times at which they emigrated, sometimes to other states or countries, and how they made a life for their families in a new land.
DNA genealogy has been a major help in finding these lines.
Sometimes someone does the work for you – even without going into politics. My wife handed me a novel last week based around research on some ancestors with Ahnentafel numbers around 3.8million in my tree, back in the early 1300s. Someone has gone into those lay subsidies and pipe rolls for me and reported the text they found!
Thanks Daphne du Maurier.
(Oh, and as they were born before 1350 in Europe, they are also ancestors to you, Judy and almost every reader).
It helps to have had parents, grandparents, and cousins of grandparents who were genealogists. Leave good tales and records for your descendants to help them along. Because my mother, her parents, and a cousin of my paternal grandmother were genealogists I’m solid out to identifying great-grandparents.
At that level there are two adoptions. One of them I know only the adopting parents, not the birth parents. The other we’ve got the adopting parents and some of the birth ancestry identified, but I and a cousin are debating whether I’ve identified the parents or whether the eldest son of the parents I identified is the birth father. (I go with my opinion, but since it is debatable…)
So the first absoulete blanks I have are at the 3rd great grandparent level, where there are three of my 2nd-great grandparents for which neither parent makes it into my database. One female emigrant from the U.S. to Canada for whom identifying the parents will take finding a surviving family bible or the like. One female for whom I don’t have enough information to have a solid research plan. One male immigrant from Germany for whom I’ve got a Ahfental chart said to have been created within the last couple decades by the mayor (or equivalent) of the town from which he immigrated so I probably could go further, but my policy is to stop at the immigrant generation.
I hadn’t figured my numbers in quite a while so I thought I’d see where I was at. I’m doing pretty good!
Parents 2
Grandparents 4
Great-Grandparents 8
Gx2-Grandparents 15
Gx3-Grandparents 26
Gx4-Grandparents 32
Gx5-Grandparents 42
Gx6-Grandparents 51
Gx7-Grandparents 53 (2 are duplicates due to pedigree collapse)
Gx8-Grandparents 34
Total 267
My mother was born in the right part of Ohio — it was settled by land grants to Revolutionary War veterans from New England states. Well documented and well published. My father had a mix of Quaker and other mid-Atlantic ancestors on one side and a Southern line, an Irish line, and a Norwegian line on the other. His Irish line is one of the gaps.
Ten years ago I had much bigger gaps, but a DNA test helped, and some serendipity helped, and some land records helped, and online research during the lockdown helped.
No one in this tree is famous enough to have been recorded as a celebrity. One person I was actually able to place in his father’s family because at the time of his father’s death, the son owed his father money and that was recorded. Another group is only there because Father — who never actually married Mother — died and his Will was Missing, so everyone made declarations to the court.