There Is A Little Math Geek In All Of Us

There have been numerous postings and news articles following the Faces of America program on PBS and most recently the Who Do You Think You Are series that premiered on NBC this past Friday night. So, I won't add to the all the noise other than to say that I applaud anything that brings genealogy into the mainstream.


With that said, I do have to mention that a conversation going on over at Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings caught my attention today. So, I thought I'd participate in the exercise to see how I'm doing with my own genealogy research.

(For those who aren't familiar with how genealogy works - you have two parents and each of them have two parents which means that each generation you go back the number of your ancestors doubles. If you work with the law of averages each generation is approximately 25 years. That means that 10 generations back is between 250 and 300 years ago. That gives you a grand total of 1,022 people responsible for your existence in just the last 300 years. What do you know about them?)

Here's how I'm doing with my 10 generation chart:

Generations 1-4: 15 out of 15 (100%)
5th Generation: 16 out of 16 (100%)
6th Generation: 30 out of 32 (93.8%)
7th Generation: 44 out of 64 (68.8%)
8th Generation: 68 out of 128 (53.1%)
9th Generation: 80 out of 256 (31.3%)
10th Generation: 75 out of 512 (14.7%)

Total: 328 out of 1,023 (32.1%)

I now have mathematical proof as to why I cringe every time someone says their genealogy is "all done" or that they've traced their family "back to the 1400s." I'm a professional genealogist and I can only prove out 32% of the people in the past 300 years responsible for my existence. That means that 68% of my ancestry is completely unknown to me.

So, even if you can carry one tiny stand of your ancestry back further than that - and I can on a couple of lines - there is always more to discover about who you are and who you come from!