Happy New Year!
My first post of 2017 is an update to the ongoing "how many ancestors have you identified" quest.
The idea is to list the "known by name" ancestors at each genealogical level: parents, grandparents, great-grandparents, etc. As the potential ancestors double and the available records decrease over time, let's check mine and see where my research challenges are.
I realize now that I didn't do this assessment in 2016, so this will be two year's worth of progress. And progress there was!
Here's my chart from 2015:
And here is 2017's:
Go me!
In green above are the generations where I found new ancestors over the past two years.
In Level 7, the 4x great-grandparents, I made zero progress. The missing ancestors are my Irish lines. I may be forever stuck here.
In Level 8, the 5x great-grandparents, I made a LOT of progress, mostly filling in information through further research. This includes finding books on my colonial American lines, and locating more records in my French-Canadian lines.
The biggest jump is in the last group, the 7x great-grandparents. I quadrupled 2015's number. This is almost singularly due to
my big break in my maternal grandmother's Wurttemberg lines. Once I broke through that brick wall this summer, the records filled in so much history. I wish you all would have Wurttemberg Lutheran ancestors, because...wow.
When I first did this exercise in 2014, I had identified 160, or 16.5% of my direct ancestors through 10 generations.
In 2015, I had 196, or 19%.
By 2017, I had a whopping
319, or 31%.
The oldest record I have to date is my maternal 10th great-grandparents, Veit SUFFEL and Maria LACHENMAIER of Rudersberg in Wurttemberg. They were married in 1649:
Happy New Year and Happy Searching!
© 2017 Sally Knudsen
