This week's challenge from Randy Seaver for Saturday Night Genealogy Fun is almost something I can do from memory, at least for some of my family lines (okay, only on my mother's side).
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1. How complete is your family tree? Do you have information about your cousins, both close and more distant? Today's challenge is to take one set of your 2nd-great-grandparents and make a descendants list (using your genealogy management program, e.g., Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, etc.).
2. Tell us about your choice of 2nd-great-grandparents and tell us approximately how many descendants of them that you have in your family tree database. Share your answers, and perhaps a chart, on your own blog or in a Facebook post. Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.
And here's mine:
My family line with the most people on it for this exercise was the Dunstans, which surprised me. I expected it to be the Gauntts. Both of these are on my father's side.
The format that Randy used is called an Outline Descendant Report in Family Tree Maker, which is the program that I primarily use. For this report FTM automatically set the number of generations at 99, which I didn't change. It turned out to be six generations anyway, the same number of generations that Randy used.
Starting with my 2nd-great-grandparents Frederick Cleworth Dunstan (1840–1873) and Martha Winn (1837–1884), the result was 12 pages with about 20 descendant names on each page, so roughly 240 descendants total. This is the first page of that report:
On my mother's side, the family with the most descendants was the Gordons (originally Gorodetsky). The report for those 2nd-great-grandparents, Victor Gordon (circa 1866–1924) and Esther Leah Schneiderman (circa 1871–1908), ran nine pages. It had about 25 descendant names on each page, so roughly 225 descendants overall.
The shortest report was for my paternal grandfather's paternal line. As I still have not determined who his biological father was, that line stops with my grandfather. The report was only four pages. I was surprised to see that when I did take it back two additional generations of Sellerses, the report only increased to six pages total. I admit I am not doing research on the Sellers line anymore, so that may be why.
Your report is still longer than mine. Most of my 2X and later had small families, so there aren't many descendants especially when some children died young.
ReplyDeleteI don't feel as bad now, thanks! But that makes yours easier to keep track of.
DeleteWere the Gordons (Gorodetskys) from Eastern Europe?
ReplyDeleteYes, they were. I have a photo taken in Kamenets Podolsky, and sometimes after that they moved to Kishinev (now Chisinau, Moldova).
Delete