Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- What Is Your Birth Surname Henry Number?

It's Saturday Night -

time for more Genealogy Fun!

  

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible music here) is to:

1)  Do you know what a "Henry Number" is?  It is a descendant numbering system from a specific person.  The Wikipedia article for Genealogical Numbering Systems describes it as:

"The Henry System is a descending system created by Reginald Buchanan Henry for a genealogy of the families of the presidents of the United States that he wrote in 1935.[3] It can be organized either by generation or not. The system begins with 1. The oldest child becomes 11, the next child is 12, and so on. The oldest child of 11 is 111, the next 112, and so on. The system allows one to derive an ancestor's relationship based on their number. For example, 621 is the first child of 62, who is the second child of 6, who is the sixth child of his parents.  In the Henry System, when there are more than nine children, X is used for the 10th child, A is used for the 11th child, B is used for the 12th child, and so on. In the Modified Henry System, when there are more than nine children, numbers greater than nine are placed in parentheses.

2)  Go to your first known ancestor with your birth surname in your software program and calculate your Henry Number from that person.  Show each generation of your line of ancestors with your birth surname with their Henry numbers.

3)  How did you calculate the Henry numbers?  What do these numbers tell you?

4)  Tell us in your own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a Facebook post.

Here's mine:

The first known Hork ancestor I have found is Rottger Horoch (1729-1816). Here is my Hork/Horoch ancestry with their Henry numbers:

1 Rottger Horoch (1729-1816)

14 Johan Horoch (1773-1826)

143 Joseph Heinrich Horoch (1804-1857)

1435 Johan Anton Horoch/Hork (1843-1906)

1435A William Cyril Hork (1899-1967)

1435A5 William Joseph Hork (1930-2007)

1435A51 Lisa Suzanne Hork (1954-living )

I created a narrative descendant chart in RootsMagic, choosing Henry numbers and recorded the Henry number next to each of our names. Unlike Randy, I am the only person who was the eldest in the family.

This is such a complicated what to keep track of people in your genealogy tree. 

Copyright © 2020 by Lisa S. Gorrell, My Trails into the Past. All Rights Reserved.