{"id":472,"date":"2012-08-17T17:59:00","date_gmt":"2012-08-17T22:59:00","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/whats-your-number-and-an-epiphany\/"},"modified":"2013-07-04T15:48:25","modified_gmt":"2013-07-04T20:48:25","slug":"whats-your-number-and-an-epiphany","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/whats-your-number-and-an-epiphany\/","title":{"rendered":"What\u2019s Your Number? (\u2026and an Epiphany)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Untitled-1\" Crista Cowan had an interesting post on the Ancestry.com blog yesterday, entitled Family History All Done?\u00a0 What\u2019s Your Number?<\/a>\u00a0 This gist of the post is that we are never really done with our family tree.\u00a0 If you were to go back ten generations on both your maternal and paternal lines, you would have 1,023 people, which would bring you back to your 7th great-grandparents…and that\u2019s just your direct-line ancestors!<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Some of us may never get beyond the first few generations for a variety of reasons, some of which include limited funds, lack of available records, not enough time, or simply not knowing where to look.\u00a0 There may be a time when all the stars are aligned and we can push back a little farther, but until then, it\u2019s important to remember that there is more to family history research than just those direct-line ancestors.\u00a0 And, in many cases, researching an entire family group can help you push back to those obscure generations.<\/p>\n

Below is my chart outlining the number of direct-line ancestors that make up a generation, how many I have positively identified, and the percentage of those identified.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

In putting this together, I realized that I have five generations of direct ancestors fully identified, and am about halfway through the sixth generation.\u00a0 This doesn\u2019t mean I am DONE with these people, it just means that I have positively identified who they are.\u00a0 There is still so much work to be done on them if I want to be able to tell the story of each individual\u2019s life.<\/p>\n

I\u2019m certainly no where near Crista\u2019s 36% overall, and I\u2019m okay with that.\u00a0 I have only been doing this since 2007, so just about five years, and I think I\u2019m off to a great start!<\/p>\n

What I\u2019ve also realized is that when I first started, I was more like a planter; I planted the seeds and made the darn tree grow.\u00a0 Over the last three years, I\u2019ve been taking more of a \u201clandscaping\u201d approach and have been working on shaping the tree and its surroundings.\u00a0 Naturally the tree continues to grow, but\u00a0 I am very careful about what goes in the tree, making sure that every branch and every leaf is in its proper place.<\/p>\n

\n

In case you are curious about how I came up with my numbers, I ran an Ancestry Chart report in Legacy (making sure to include the generation numbers), printed it out, and then counted up every individual in a particular generation.\u00a0 This was the easiest thing I could think of.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Crista Cowan had an interesting post on the Ancestry.com blog yesterday, entitled Family History All Done?\u00a0 What\u2019s Your Number?\u00a0 This gist of the post is that we are never really done with our family tree.\u00a0 If you were to go back ten generations on both […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_uf_show_specific_survey":0,"_uf_disable_surveys":false,"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[27,25,26],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-472","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-how-to","category-genblog","category-personal-research","cat-27-id","cat-25-id","cat-26-id"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3HcLI-7C","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=472"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3059,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/472\/revisions\/3059"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=472"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=472"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/genealogy.julietarr.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=472"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}