I have to admit this post will be very short because absolutely no new numbers have been added to either my or my husband’s direct lines.

I also have to admit that my focus has been on cleaning up lines, which have added many collateral families.

Both of our trees are also at the point where brick walls are pretty much just that – with ancestors living in places where there are very few or no primary records at all.

Dave’s tree even decreased by 2 because I decided that a couple of ancestors way back were questionable and I removed them.

Here’s my table:

My count certainly isn’t too shabby, but from now on, I’ll need to rely on scholarly research in England to really take my end-of-line earliest families back any further.

There was an article published last year that did add a couple of names of people who lived in the early 1400s and were found in probate records, but I didn’t add another generation to this tree.

Dave’s table:

Zippo news here and his end-of-line families aren’t stuck crossing the pond to Europe, they are mostly stuck because they lived on the American colonial frontier where there are no records.

I’ll never say never, but without new clues to point the way, I am not expecting any big changes in either of our ancestral direct line numbers.

Since I am busy working on cleaning up and adding to RootsMagic 7, which is my major goal for this year, I’ll note now that I currently have 10, 085 people in my database. With many collateral families now identified, let’s see how much that number grows in 2023 as I get the data entered in the software.

Did you make any great discoveries to extend your own lines last year?

It’s time for the annual Ancestor Count. I’ve had some successes in both my tree and that of my husband in 2021. However, I have to admit that my successes are mostly due to my favorite genealogical journal, The New England Historic Genealogical Register, as I find scholarly research involving my early New England lines frequently published.

Linda’s Ancestor Count

My gain of 29 direct line ancestors is about 99% due to The Register journal articles of 2021.

However, I can claim more of the credit for the small increase in my husband’s family tree, as I made good progress with some of his Scots-Irish families.

Dave’s Ancestor Count

His family tree now has an additional 15 people added to his direct line.

Both of us have quite a few new collateral relatives because of these discoveries.

I used the Ahnentafel report in RootsMagic to count up the ancestors in each generation. It only took a few minutes to do each table.

We’ll see what new information turns up in 2022.

How has your ancestor count progressed during this past year?

Last year, I somehow overlooked my Ancestor Count update until later into 2020 instead of my completing my usual January update.

For my 2021 update, I have to admit that in previous years, I completed my ancestor count manually. I have so many ancestral lines that extend so far back in time that I created new paper charts (handwritten) beginning with great- and 2X great grandparents.

That meant beginning counts at different places on the charts when adding in newly discovered ancestors. With new research into early English probate records being published in scholarly journals, my number counts changed quite a bit.

However, my multiple paper charts also made it easy to get off kilter when switching from one paper chart to another to continue the count.

This year, I finally gave up and used the Ahnentafel report in RootsMagic. I have to say it was much easier counting people in one list rather than on a half dozen different charts.

Dave’s Stufflebean Ancestor Count shows a 20-person increase from the 2020 totals. I am pleased with that increase because his family loved living on the frontier and in burned counties across the South!

Dave actually asked about his numbers compared to mine when updating the Excel file and commented that my big jump in numbers was all due to my New England lines – he’s right!

Stufflebean Ancestor Count

I mentioned that it was easy to get off kilter when manually counting and I found two generations with an actual slightly lower total this year – my 9X and 10X great grandparents are now correctly counted.

The difference was small – 8 fewer people in the 9X group and 9 fewer people in the 10X group.

I am very excited, though, in the huge leap in total number of ancestors identified, from 891 to 1065!

I hope your Ancestor Count has increased over the past year, too.