Saturday Night Genealogy Fun – My Ancestor Score for 2015

Last year, for the premiere of this blog, I took Randy Seaver's Genea-Musings Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge, What's Your Ancestor Score?, resulting in the post My Ancestor Score. This year he has repeated the challenge in Your Ancestor Score for 2015, so I dusted off last year's spreadsheet and checked my pedigree chart to see how my score has improved.

The "score" is found by counting 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 updated 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 had at least a first name in them. 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.

The research I did throughout the year for the "52 Ancestors in 52 Weeks" challenge paid off. No change in my great-great-great-grandparents – three of them still stubbornly refuse to show themselves – but each of the next six generations improved! The 4x great-grands are up 7 (from last year's 31); 5x up 8 (from 37); 6x almost doubled, up 20 (from 21); 7x up 16 (from 20); 8x up 13 (from 21); and 9x up 10 (from 16).

For the 10-generation benchmark I end up at 220 identified out of 1,023 total, or 21.5%, compared to last year's 169 (16.5%).  That's 51 newly identified ancestors! Going back two more generations for extra credit, I identified an additional 23 new ancestors, yielding a score of 280 out of 4,095, or 6.8% (last year it was 206 or 5.0%).

Let's hope I can do at least as well in the coming year!