When I first read the post by Crista Cowen about finding “your number” I knew I wanted to make my own chart. Then Randy Seaver created the SNGF prompt…perfect! Challenge Accepted!
Here are his instructions:
Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and I hope more of you do than participated in the SNGF Genealympics the last three weeks), is to:
1) Determine how complete your genealogy research is. For background, read Crista Cowan’s post Family History All Done? What’s Your Number? For comparison purposes, keep the list to 10 generations with you as the first person.
2) Create a table similar to Crista’s second table, and fill it in however you can (you could create an Ahnentafel (Ancestor Name) list and count the number in each generation, or use some other method). Tell us how you calculated the numbers.
3) Show us your table, and calculate your “Ancestral Name Number” – what is your percentage of known names to possible names (1,023 for 10 generations).
4) For extra credit (or more SNGF), do more generations and add them to your chart.
5) Post your table, and your “Ancestral Name Number,” on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status or Google+ Stream post.
Here’s what I did.
1) I created a narrative report in RootsMagic for 10 generations. I did this for myself, Troy, and our sons.
2) And here are our charts.
3) Our Ancestral Numbers for 10 generations are:
Julliana – 3%
Troy – 24%
Ben&James – 24%
Wow, it’s looking bad. My family is so hard to research…since they are all in Brazil or Portugal. Plus, Troy’s side of the family are all pioneers with a long line of genealogists who have done lots of work. My father is the only one to have done any work on my side, and now I’m taking over.
Everything I know for my side of the family is what my grandparents could remember and tell my dad. He had a few death certificates and birth records, but that’s it. I’m now going through trying to find documentation for everything and even just my grandmother’s information is hard to find. Also, the tradition is that one of my mom’s grandmothers was a native Brazilian…who knows how far back I’ll even be able to go?!?
At least now I can see that I have a lot of work to do (knew that before) and that I can quantify any progress I make.