It’s time to take a look at progress made in identifying new ancestors in 2024.

I didn’t expect the count to go up much for either myself or my husband because my tree is already back so far and his family picked every place to live that has no early records.

Here’s my 2025 table:

Notice that I did add 11 new ancestors – two in Generation 11, five in Generation 12, two more in Generation 13 and two more in Generation 15. I can’t take credit for those discoveries as they were identified in scholarly articles found in genealogy journals.

Here’s my husband’s table:

He also has 9 newly identified ancestors – one in Generation 7, two in Generation 9, one in Generation 10, two in Generation 11 and two in Generation 12 and one in Generation 14.

Overall, I am more than happy with the 2024 discoveries!

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?