SNGF: Children/grandchildren in Matrilineal Lines

Randy Seaver's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge for tonight involves counting the number of children and grandchildren for each woman in your matrilineal line--so mother, mother's mother, mother's mother's mother.....

My matrilineal line:

1.      Nancy Leah Swicegood (1917-1996) had 5 children (1 died in infancy), 2 grandchildren

2.      Molly Fay Brookshire (1894-1966) had 6 children, 15 grandchildren (1 died in infancy)

3.      Nancy Jane Collins (1873-1966) had 3 children, 8 grandchildren

4.      Rebecca Jane Campbell (1842-1882) had 8 children, 25 grandchildren [3 husbands; 3 children died young]

5.      Sarah Anne Crabtree (1817-1856) had 8 children, 30 grandchildren

6.      Rebecca Sally Holeman (1774-185x) had 10 children, no idea how many grandchildren

 

After a long day of driving, I was too tired to generate outline descendant charts for each woman and seriously study the results. I just looked at each generation in FTM 2014 and added the child counts. I think my research is pretty complete through the 5th generation, but haven't researched most of Rebecca Holeman's children.

 

SNGF: My Ancestor Score

Randy Seaver's challenge for this week is to calculate you Ancestor Score. You can check out his blog post here for the details.

Figuring out my ancestor score was a tad more complicated than for others, it seems. I keep my maternal and paternal lines in separate Family TreeMaker files. I tried Randy's technique of generating an Ahnenfelt chart in FTM, but it was way too cumbersome, as it included all of my notes. So instead, I generated 10-generation pedigree charts for each of my databases and just counted the number of lines that had names on them. Granted, some of the wives in earlier generation only had given names, but I counted those anyway. And, to be perfectly honest, I'm not absolutely convinced that all of the 9th and 10th generation ancestors in my trees are correct.

So....drumroll please....my results:

Generation	Relationship	Possible People	People in MY Tree	Percent Identified
1	Me	1	1	100%
2	Parents	2	2	100%
3	Grandparents	4	4	100%
4	Great-grandparents	8	8	100%
5	2x Great-grandparents	16	16	100%
6	3x Great-grandparents	32	28	88%
7	4x Great-grandparents	64	28	44%
8	5x Great-grandparents	128	35	27%
9	6x Great-grandparents	256	24	9%
10	7x Great-grandparents	512	21	4%

Can you tell that I'm not a genealogist who focuses on seeing how far back I can take a line? I get really hung up on the stories and trying to prove or disprove them. Not surprisingly, I don't have many stories from earlier than my 3x great-grandparents, so I don't spend much time on them. And my paternal ancestry is more sparse than my maternal one. Through 6 generations I'm 100% on my maternal line, then my percentage drops fast. Overall, my ancestor score was just 16% for the ten generations. Maybe I'll try to focus on filling in the 6th and 7th generations this coming year.