SNGF: Your Ancestor Score for 2015

Randy’s Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge was posted last night at Genea-Musings. This week’s challenge was to find out how many direct ancestors you’ve found. Here are the rules:

1. 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.

I had never run an Ahnentafel chart, but it was really easy with RootsMagic. Then, I just counted my ancestors for each generation!

This took longer than it should have as I’d found some amazing church records over a year ago that I’d never added to my tree. In a small village in Germany, I’ve had ancestors back to the early 1600s! And, someone has put all these people online, but I hadn’t added them to my tree.

I do want to stress that I actually got these records for myself and looked through them. Though they are in German, I was able to read quite a bit of it… enough for me to be pretty confident in what this person has shared.

So, here’s my chart (which I had difficulty figuring out how to do… I finally made it in Excel & then pasted it into PowerPoint):

So, I have 161 direct ancestors on my family tree! (Well, to the 7x great grandparents level… I also have 8 of my 8x great grandparents! I don’t have anything beyond that.)

I think it is interesting that I’m still missing 4 of my 3x great grandparents. I think I’ll look at those and see if I can find at least one this year!