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

 

© 2015 Copyright by Jana Last, All Rights Reserved

Some of My Childhood Memories ~ Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Randy Seaver, author of Genea-Musings, has provided a wonderful opportunity for us to share some of our childhood memories for this week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun (SNGF). The idea was inspired by Judy Russell's Keynote address at RootsTech 2014. Judy Russell is the author of The Legal Genealogist blog.

In Judy's keynote address, she asked the audience six questions about their parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents. With this exercise, she showed how quickly stories about our ancestors are forgotten or not known at all.

For today's SNGF, Randy has asked us to answer Judy's six questions from her keynote address. But, instead of answering these questions about our ancestors, we are to answer them about our own childhood. What a great idea!

So, here are the questions:


1)  What was your first illness as a child?
2)  What was the first funeral you attended?
3)  What was your favorite book as a child?
4)  What was your favorite class in elementary school?
5)  What was your favorite toy as a child?
6)  Did you learn how to swim, and where did you learn?



And, here are my answers:

1) I don't remember what my first illness was, but I know that I had mumps when I was 10 years old. I had it on both sides of my face. I also had chickenpox. I believe I had chickenpox sometime after I had mumps, which meant I was an older child when I had it. My two brothers and I had chickenpox at the same time. I had it pretty bad. I even had blisters in my throat. Yes, it was pretty miserable.

2) I'm not sure about the first funeral I attended, but I do have a memory of getting up early to travel up to Oregon to attend the funeral of my Aunt Pamela. I was 11 years old at the time. We lived in California, so this was going to be a long car ride. My Aunt Pamela tragically passed away of leukemia at only 24 years of age. She was my father's sister.

3) I had a few favorite books when I was a child. I remember that my father brought these books home when a school was giving them away. I still have these books today. They are "The Horse That Takes The Milk Around," The Crooked Colt," "Blaze And Thunderbolt," and "Miss Suzy."



The illustrations in "The Horse That Takes The Milk Around" are so cute.



This is one of the pages from "The Crooked Colt."



4) Unfortunately, I don't remember if I had a favorite class or grade in elementary school.

5) Some of my favorite toys as a child were toy horses. I used to collect model horses to put on a shelf in my room. I believe I had some Breyer horses in that collection as well. And, I didn't just collect horses. I also had Barbie dolls and even some Matchbox cars too. My two brothers and I used to play cars on a cloth car town. We still have it to this day. Here it is -



It had a house, an airport, a gas station, a grocery store, a church, a hospital, a fire station, a train station, a barn, and a lake called Emerald Lake. And it even had a train track that went around the town. These were stitched onto the blue cloth background. My brothers and I had so much fun playing cars on this car town when we were little kids. I also had a collection of marbles. I liked the pretty ones. These are some of the marbles from my collection. I kept a few of my childhood toys so I could show them to my children.



6) I did learn how to swim. I don't remember exactly where I learned though. I do remember going to a local community college to either attend swimming classes or to just swim during free swim time there. Perhaps I went to both the classes and the free swim times.

I hope my children and grandchildren will enjoy reading this post and learning about some of my childhood memories.

Thanks Randy Seaver for this week's SNGF prompt which provided an opportunity to travel down memory lane. It's been fun!

Thanks for reading!

Jana

© 2014 Copyright by Jana Last, All Rights Reserved