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Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What's Your Ancestral Name Number?

   Randy Seaver of GeneaMusings has a fun activity on Saturday afternoons and asks other genealogists to join in the fun.  This week's activity is to find the number of your ancestors you have identified in your research.  If you have researched back 10 generations, that would add up to 1023 ancestors, including yourself.  Wow, that's a lot of people!  I wonder how many I have found?

   I use RootsMagic to record my genealogy and created a report called "Ahnentafel of Lisa Suzanne Hork".  It lists my ancestors using the Antentafel Numbering System.  1 is for myself, 2 is my father, and 2+1=3 is my mother.  Now you double your father and my grandfather's number is 4, and add 1 to that number for his wife, my paternal grandmother and she is 5.  Do the same for my mother (3X2=6 (maternal grandfather) and 6+1=7 (maternal grandmother).  Here's a short chart to illustrate the numbering system:


  1. me
  2. father
  3. mother
  4. paternal grandfather
  5. paternal grandmother
  6. maternal grandfather
  7. maternal grandmother
  8. great-grandfather
  9. great-grandmother
  10. great-grandfather
  11. great-grandmother
  12. great-grandfather
  13. great-grandmother
  14. great-grandfather
  15. great-grandmother

   So I found the ancestors from my report that I have researched and created this chart showing the number of people for each generation up to 10.


I am very pleased to see I have identified all of my great-great-grandparents and 75% of my 3x great-grandparents.  Where I lack is in the Irish ancestry.  Once I got the Sullivan, Gleeson, Tierney & Murray lines back to Ireland, the trail grew cold.  However, in Germany, I am able to get back several generations using wonderful German Church Records.

On my mother's side, all of the research is in the U.S. and most of it in southern states.  Most of the research done on the 9th and 10 generations above were done by others and I have not yet substantiated the research by my own research yet.  I hope to do that soon.

So what is my Ancestral Name Number?  It's 134 out of 1023, making that 13.1%.  I am very far from complete with my genealogy!

Copyright © 2012 by Lisa Suzanne Gorrell, My Trails into the Past

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