Saturday Night Genealogy Fun ~ My Ancestor Score for January 2015

I decided to participate in tonight's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF) brought to us by Randy Seaver, author of Genea-Musings. Here's what Randy proposed for tonight's SNGF (shared from his blog):

1)  Determine how complete your genealogy research is.  For background, read Crista Cowan's post Family History All Done? What’s Your Number? and Kris Stewart's What Is Your Genealogy "Score?" For comparison purposes, keep the list to 10 or 11 generations with you as the first person. 
2)  Create a table similar to Crista's second table, and fill it in however you can (you could create an Ahnentafel (Ancestor Name) list and count the number in each generation, or use some other method).  Tell us how you calculated the numbers.
3)  Show us your table, and calculate your "Ancestral Score" - what is your percentage of known names to possible names (1,023 for 10 generations).
4)  For extra credit (or more SNGF), do more generations and add them to your chart.
5)  Post your table, and your "Ancestor Score," on your own blog, in a comment to this post, or in a Facebook Status post or Google+ Stream post.

I thought this would be an interesting idea. I've seen this kind of thing before, but had never made an "Ancestor Name Chart" or figured out the "Ancestor Score" for my own family tree.

Here's my Ancestor Name Chart.
  


And here's my "Ancestor Score" for my family tree:

• Number of known ancestor names = 405
• Number of possible ancestor names = 1,023
• Ten generation ancestor name score = 405/1,023 = 39.6%

In order to make my Ancestor Name Chart, I created an Ancestor Book Report using my Legacy Family Tree database. I then created a PDF of the report and counted the ancestors in each generation. I put that information in the Excel chart (above). Like Randy, I chose to exclude ancestors who didn't have a first name.

Through five generations the percentage stays at 100%. After that things start to go downhill. And my ancestral score isn't very high. I obviously have a lot of work to do. But, I suppose it could be worse. You see, I can't take the credit for finding all of the ancestors in my family tree. I was blessed to have inherited genealogy research from my father, Jan Iverson, a lot of which had been done by a professional genealogist many years ago. The professional genealogist was hired by my paternal grandmother, Ingrid Gillberg, to help us with our Scandinavian lines.

I'm also blessed to have in my possession the excellent and very well-sourced three-volume family history books called Waterman Family, Descendants of Robert Waterman by Donald Lines Jacobus which provide priceless information about my Waterman ancestors.

Even with all of the wonderful genealogy research I've been given, there is still so much more research that needs to be done. This fan chart from FamilySearch illustrates this. As you can see, there are holes in this chart that need to be filled. My mom is at the center of this chart. She's still living, so I blurred her name for privacy reasons.



What about you? What's your Ancestor Score?

Thanks for reading!

Jana

 

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