Sunday, February 25, 2018

How Many Ancestors: 2018 Edition

Finally!

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.