Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What's Your Ancestor Score?

I don't much care for math - BUT - I love statistics!  I know, I can't explain it, it's just the way it is!

So when I saw Randy Seaver's latest Saturday Night Genealogy Fun, I had to do it!

His mission:

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.


And my report back:

1) Some of my New England ancestors are extremely well-documented back to England through the 1500s and beyond - other lines of mine stop in a brick wall in just a few generations.  So I created an ahnentafel report in my family tree software and counted away.  I had to do a separate report for my mother's and father's lines as my dad researches his side and so it's a separate record to be accessed by the software.

2) and 3) and 4) Here is a screenshot of my table.  I built it in Excel.  The percentage column is for each row with the total at the bottom.



 My ancestor score at the 10 generation mark is 6.45% - the numbers drop pretty quickly by generation 7!

My overall score for all 15 generations is just 1.37%!!  Pretty amazing when I feel like I have so many names - turns out I really don't!  :-)   It's really quite humbling - there's still so much out there.  One of the hardest things though is not just gathering names, but gathering the real proof that goes along with them - and that's been my main focus the last few years.  I don't want to waste time researching a line back that I can't really prove is my line when it comes under scrutiny.  I learned that from my application to the DAR.  :-)

 

SNGF - Surname Distributions

Randy Seaver has posted another Saturday Night Genealogy Fun suggestion! This week it's:

1) Find out the geographical distribution of your surname - in the world, in your state or province, in your county or parish. I suggest that you use the Public Profiler site at http://www.publicprofiler.org/worldnames/, which seems to work quickly and easily. However, you cannot capture the image as a photo file - you have to capture the screen shot, save it and edit it.

2) Tell us about your surname distribution in a blog post of your own (with a screen shot if possible), in comments to this post, or in comments on a social networking site like Facebook and Twitter.


For "Kleylein", I was curious if anything at all would come up, because it is not a common surname at all. Sure enough though, I got some hits:



According to this website, we Kleylein's only exist in 5 countries and within those countries, we're a pretty small percentage (frequency per million):

Germany - 3.05%
Belgium - 0.29%
US - 0.14%
Spain - 0.10%
Argentina - 0.08%

As far as I know, "Kleylein" originated in Germany and in fact is pretty localized to the Bayern region. I visited Unterrodach years ago, which is where my line of Kleylein's came from. That's consistent with this website that says Marktrodach is the Top City for finding Kleylein's.

Once my father gave up and joined Facebook along with the rest of the world, he immediately began searching for all the other Kleylein's he could find and sending them friend requests. Thanks to him, I'm FB friends with one of the Kleylein's in Argentina, which is pretty cool, considering there's even fewer of them there than in the US.

My mom's surname is another unique one ("Domelle"), so naturally I did a search on that one as well:



And yep, even less Domelle's are out there. Interestingly, the website says there are Domelle's in West county, Ireland. I'm not sure I buy that, since I know for sure my great-grandfather immigrated from the Austro-Hungarian Empire. So, that is either a coincidence of spelling, or some person from the family moved to Ireland at some point. I also know for a fact there is a branch of the family in Canada, but Canada does not show any Domelle's for this website. Nobody's perfect I guess!

When I click on the map of the US for Domelle, it is pretty good in it's distribution by state, although I believe one state in the South is missing:


When the Domelle's immigrated, they mostly ended up in Indiana where they were farmers.

This is a fun little website, I did searches on pretty much every surname I have and then some. Thanks Randy!

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.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Genealogy Trading Cards

Okay, yes, late as usual, but only a day late. And yes, I'm supposed to be working on actual work-related documents like spreadsheets and powerpoints right now, but hey, everyone needs a break once in a while, right???

Randy's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun suggestion was creating genealogy trading cards. Some people have done a really great job! I'm not as witty (or as professional) as some, and so, here's what I came up with:


Fun's over, back to my real-job work. :-) Until I find something more interesting again...