Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: My Ancestor Score

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings issues a weekly "challenge" to have some Saturday Night Genealogy Fun. For the premiere of Pine Trees and Pedigrees, I decided to take tonight's What's Your Ancestor Score? challenge and find out how "complete" my genealogy is. Check out Randy's post at the link for some background; in a nutshell, you count up the number of direct ancestors you have identified, as a percentage of the total possible number of direct ancestors through at least 10 generations (more for "extra credit") starting with yourself as generation 1. Here are my results:

I came up with the numbers by generating a 10-generation pedigree chart in Reunion, and counting up the number of boxes in each generation that actually had names in them. Well, some of the women have only first names... The chart shows the number of possible people and the number identified, in each generation and as running totals for all generations, and I calculated the percentage identified by generation and overall.

Perfect score through my great-great-grandparents, pretty close for the great-great-great-grands, and still quite respectable for g-g-g-g-grands – but it drops off pretty rapidly after that. For the 10-generation benchmark I end up at 169 identified out of 1,023 total, or 16.5%. Going back two more generations for extra credit, my score sinks to 5.0% (206 out of 4,095). Clearly I have my work cut out for me!