Saturday, April 7, 2018

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Your World Birth Number

For this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge, Randy Seaver is asking us to determine where we as individuals fit in the vast number of people who have been born on this planet.

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission:  Impossible! music) is to:

(1) Use the Population Counter on the BBC News Web site to determine your place in the current world population and your place in all of history (of course, these are estimates; see the site for how they calculated this).  Enter your birth date into the fields and click "Go."

(2) Tell us about your results in your own blog post, as a comment on this blog post, or as a status line in Facebook or a Stream post on Google+.  Please leave a link to your blog post as a comment on this post.


Okay, here's mine:

According to the BBC site, when I was born on April 9, 1962 (yes, my birthday is coming up in a mere two days) I was the 3,139,677,413rd (which the site had as 3,139,677,413th) person alive on the planet.  Apparently I was the 76,883,755,328th person born over the course of Earth's history.

Because Randy mentioned it, I also determined how many people were born on my birthday, which turned out to be 159,097, or at least that's the difference between the number on April 9 and that of April 10 (3,139,836,510).  So that means that 77,595 fewer people were born on my birth date than on Randy's.

My father was the 2,191,765,540th person born, and my mother the 2,308,070,206th.

Randy wondered if there will ever be an online family tree with the names of everyone ever born.  That is the intended purpose of the FamilySearch Family Tree, but it's a good question whether it will ever happen.

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