Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - My Ancestral Name Number

This week Randy Seaver, of Genea-Musings, issued a Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge in which we look at how "complete" our genealogy. Here is the challenge:

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 YourNumber?  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.

It’s always interesting to look at the results of one’s research results statistically so this was fun for me!

I already had a 10-generation ahnentafel report compiled by my genealogy software program saved in a pdf file. I hand-counted the number of individuals in each generation; the numbers include ancestors for which I have only a first name or a surname. Here are the results:

Generation	Relationship	# Possible	# Known	Percentage
1	You	1	1	100.0%
2	Parents	2	2	100.0%
3	Grandparents	4	4	100.0%
4	Great-grandparents	8	8	100.0%
5	2nd Great-grandparents	16	16	100.0%
6	3rd Great-grandparents	32	20	62.5%
7	4th Great-grandparents	64	30	46.9%
8	5th Great-grandparents	128	22	17.2%
9	6th Great-grandparents	256	22	8.6%
10	7th Great-grandparents	512	24	4.7%
Summary		1023	149	14.6%

Less than 15% identified!

Although I have identified all 16 of my 3^rd great-grandparents (the 5^th generation), my numbers start dropping dramatically in the sixth generation. Part of the reason for this is I have been unable to identify many paternal ancestors (my “southern” line). A couple of my maternal lines, however, stretch back to the earliest days of Colonial America.

I can see that I have plenty to keep me occupied researching right here in the U.S. Someday maybe I’ll get to the point where I can cross the pond!

© 2012 Denise Spurlock