Saturday, April 8, 2017

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: A Family's Increase

This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge from Randy Seaver has people determining which part of their family tree has been the most fruitful:

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:

(1) Pick one of your sets of great-grandparents—if possible, the one with the most descendants.

(2) Create a descendants list for those great-grandparents either by hand or in your software program.

(3) Tell us how many descendants, living or dead, are in each generation from those great-grandparents.

(4) How many are still living?  Of those, how many have you met and exchanged family information with?  Are there any that you should make contact with ASAP?  Please don't use last names of living people for this; respect their privacy.

(5) Write about it in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments or a note on Facebook.


1.  I chose my great-grandparents Thomas Kirkland Gauntt (1870–1951) and Jane Dunstan (1872–1955).

2.  I created a standard descendant tree in Family Tree Maker and counted everyone manually.

3.  The number of their descendants, as far as what is currently entered in my family tree database, is:
• Children = 10 (all deceased; 4 had no children)
• Grandchildren = 24 (8 deceased, 8 alive, 8 unknown)
• Great-grandchildren = 51 (4 deceased, 47 alive)
• Great-great-grandchildren = 41 (3 deceased, 38 alive)
• 3x-great-grandchildren = 15 (all alive)
• 4x-great-grandchildren = 2 (both alive)
• 5x-great-grandchildren = 0

4.  The total I currently know about is 141 increase, and I am sure there are more.  Of that total, 116 are still living (as of the most recent updates I've received).  I have met, in person or online, 26 of the total, and of those 22 are still living.  I've exchanged family information with most of my cousins.

Are there any with whom I should make contact ASAP?  Sure, all the ones I haven't yet!  In particular, I know almost nothing about the Flynns (although I've tried searching for them and have gotten nowhere).  I also need to get updated information on several cousins about whom I have basic information already.

4 comments:

  1. This assignment was a doozy for me. It was a definite wake up call for how much work I still need to do. I wish that I could say that I"ve exchanged family info with most of my cousins and other relatives. Some of them are tighter than ticks with the information. :)

    Good luck finding information on your Flynn line. May the bricks in that wall start falling away very soon.

    Have a blessed Sunday.

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    1. It's good to make these assessments of where we are in our research every now and then, isn't it? SNGF is really good at helping me do that.

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  2. I agree the exercises at SNGF show good areas to work on in my research. My original research goal was to get each of my various lines to immigration so my living family were kind of put on the back burner as far as interest in research. I do need to contact my cousins again as it has been several years since I have updated with them.

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    Replies
    1. I used to be in much better contact with my various cousins. I need to get back on the ball.

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