Here is my 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, the challenge increases. Let's check mine and see what I've found.
Here's my chart from 2017:
And here is 2018's:
Some improvement...
In blue above are the generations where I found new ancestors over the last year.
In Level 7, the 4x great-grandparents, I made zero progress. The missing ancestors are my Irish lines. I may be forever stuck here. I have some new leads, but they are still speculative.
In Levels 8, 9 and 10, I located new records for my maternal grandmother's West Prussian family. I had great success with her Wuerttemburg lines in 2017, and now Ancestry added West Prussian microfilms that I had rented years ago, but were now much more complete and had some search capabilities. Many of these records are from what is now Poland.
Numberswise, I added 2 percentage points to my total, and now know fully a third of ten generations of ancestors (including me!) by name. Not bad!
I know were aren't supposed to be name collectors, but I enjoy this post every year ;)
One great record I found was the marriage of a pair of 7th great-grandparents, Marcin Mazciewski to Maria Nyckzynski, in Sommerau, Kries Rosenberg, West Prussia in 1744. I love how the marriages are just squeaked in on the page:
Happy Belated New Year and Happy Searching!
© 2018 Sally Knudsen
Snips: Ancestry.com. Germany, Lutheran Baptisms, Marriages, and Burials, 1518-1921 [database on-line]. Lehi, UT, USA: Ancestry.com Operations, Inc., 2017.