UPDATED: Thank you, Randy Seaver for catching my typo in Dave’s Generation 11 totals. I’ve corrected it!

Somehow, January flew by and I forgot to compile my ancestor statistics for 2019. I know I’ve made progress on some early generations in both my and my husband’s family trees.

Dave’s Ancestor Count

Considering the number of ancestors still undiscovered versus the possible record sets available, small progress is positive progress!

2019 was an excellent year as I was able to document one new 3X great grandparent, one 4X great grandparent, nine 5X great grandparents (!!!) and one 10X great grandparent in Dave’s family tree for an increase of 12 previously unidentified ancestors.

Considering his ancestors all took off for the frontier and burned counties, 12 new additions to the family tree is more than respectable progress.

Linda’s Ancestor Count

My ancestor count has made even more gains, although I can’t take much credit for that. Instead of heading out west, my ancestors stayed put in New England, land of many vital records and home to professional journals like the New England Historic Genealogical Society’s The Register, which publishes scholarly works.

Along with the benefit of having my ancestors as subjects of these scholarly projects, I also followed several online hints and then determined myself through my own research whether or not new family relationships had been proved.

I now have two new 5X great grandparents, five new 7X great grandparents, ten new 8X great grandparents, 23 new 9X great grandparents and  12 new 10X great grandparents! That makes 52 newly identified ancestors in my own family tree.

2019 was a very successful research year for me. Having said that, I sincerely doubt that next year’s ancestor count will show anywhere near these gains.

Oh well, I can only hope – and work hard!

With the beginning of each new year, I take a look at the ancestor count statistics to gauge how many new direct ancestors have been identified during the preceding year.

I’ve made some real progress in identifying some 1600s families in colonial New England back to old England in my family tree, but not many new names have been added to the total count.

I’ve also had good success tracing some of husband Dave’s lines back into the 1700s, which is a daunting task because most of his lines migrated westward out of the South, aka land of burned county records! If county records are gone, it’s a good bet that someone in his family lived there at some point!

Linda’s 2019 Ancestor Count

Dave’s 2019 Ancestor Count

However, even taking into consideration the fact that most of us have double descents from some ancestors, having identified 841 of my direct line and ONLY 295 of Dave’s ancestors out of a possible 32,767 means I have a LOT of work to do.

UPDATE: I’ve been very distracted for the last couple of days because our refrigerator totally quit! I didn’t realize that I hadn’t added in the stats graphs at the bottom of today’s post, but they are there now. 🙂

With the beginning of each new year, I take a look at the ancestor count statistics to gauge how many new direct ancestors have been identified during the preceding year.

This year, although it doesn’t look like much progress has been made, I have actually identified some ancestors (or read well-documented research in journals like The Register, published by the New England Historic Genealogical Society) for generations not depicted on these graphs.

I’ve also realized that, while using my PAPER 15-generation pedigree chart, I have missed out on counting some of those ancestors identified in the earliest generations. With my lengthy list of early New England families, only a limited number of the ninth generation could be continued on the back side of the chart.

I solved that problem by creating more paper pedigree charts that I began with my 2X great grandparents, which allowed me to easily count direct line ancestors back to the 15th generation. (I prefer the visual charts to using software for this particular task.)

For that reason, I’ve decided to increase the number of generations to fifteen generations. My percentage of ancestors identified will decrease significantly this year (and the 50% Slovak paternal side of the family will forever remain undiscovered due to no records in existence), but in the future, I will be able to more accurately count newly discovered ancestors on Mom’s side of the family.

Dave’s family will also have a lower beginning percentage of identified ancestors, but if I can ever figure out where some of these families left some documentation, his family tree has the potential for much more growth than mine.

Linda’s 2018 Ancestor Count

Dave’s 2018 Ancestor Count