Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - A Family's Increase

I just love the ideas that pop up over at http://www.geneamusings.com/! So often, it makes me look at my research data with a fresh eye, which is something I definitely need! This week, the assignment is:

1) Pick one of your four great-grandparents - if possible, the one with the most descendants.

2) Create a descendants list for those great-grandparents either by hand or in your software program.

3) Tell us how many descendants, living or dead, are in each generation from those great-grandparents.

4) How many are still living? Of those, how many have you met and exchanged family information with? Are there any that you should make contact with ASAP? Please don't use last names of living people for this - respect their privacy.

5) Write about it in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments or a Note on Facebook.


1) I chose my great-grandparents William Homer Mix and Cornelia Elizabeth Akins.

2) I did a descendant's list in Family Tree Maker.

3) Number of descendant's by generation:

a. Children: 10 (9 deceased, 1 living)
b. Grand-children: 37 (5 deceased, 32 living)
c. Great-grandchildren: 44 (all living)
d. Great-great-grandchildren: 17 (all living)

4) So William and Cornelia's increase is 108 people. 14 are deceased, so that leaves 94 remaining. I do know there's probably a lot more because there are a bunch of distant cousins that I don't have family information on. For all I know they are deceased as well. 50 of the 94 remaining are younger than me and probably not likely to have family information to pass on to me. So that leaves 44. Of those 44, I've met only 3!!!!!!! Those 44 are all cousins (2nd and beyond) that I've never met. So I now have something on my list to do!

I also have the problem of losing track of people after the 1930 census. The release of the 1940 information can't come soon enough.

I also now have a job of going back to the SSDI and searching for death dates for the Mix line, something I haven't gone back to in several years. I do belong to 2 newspaper archive sites, but unfortunately, neither of them have local newspapers from the Finger Lakes region of New York yet.