Day 236: A Day of Daunting Personal History

I decided to begin my family history tree today. I know that was something I was supposed to do in 9th grade when I was learning about chromosomes, but I procrastinate. Plus, the databases that we have now make it much easier to create a longer lineage.

Since that chromosome project during freshman year, I have been interested in creating a much larger and more detailed family map. The trouble with creating that used to be the reliance on people’s memories. But now, and for some time, Ancestry.com and several other sites have been collecting information and creating databases of everyone’s family history based on birth, census, and death records, to name a few. There are also boat manifestos and residency records. I actually found a picture of my grandma from her high school yearbook. That was cool to see! I also stumbled across what I think is my great grandfather’s WWII registration. Pretty neat.

I used Ancestry to create the family tree while cross-referencing their database with a phone app called Family Tree. I highly recommend using Family Tree because it is free and everything is already connected for you, but the names are not put into a nice visual web. Ancestry is expensive if you want all the records and pictures, but it is free to create the tree. So that is what I did.

Using these two databases, I was quickly impressed and overwhelmed with the amount of data that is out there now. I have not completed my entire web (for reasons you will soon understand), but I did trace at least one bloodline 18 generations back to Jacob Engelken and his parents from Groningen, Netherlands who were born in the 1400s. I also found a long line of German heritage on the other side of the family. There was one man, so far, from England and one from Ireland. I knew my red hair had to be in there somewhere!

After taking a break for the day, I started to think about how many people it actually took to create me. For each generation that you go backward, the number of people required to make a child doubles. For example, we start with me (1) and then to my parents (2) and then to all my grandparents (4) and then to all my great grandparents (8). In total, that 2+4+8= 14 people that were needed to make me. So, being the math nerd that I am, I really needed to know how many people it took to make one human from 18 generations ago. With the help of some handy-dandy algorithms and Google Sheets, I discovered that in the 18th generation there would be 262,144 people ready to have a baby. Including those people and from that point on (adding each generation with the previous one), there are a total of 524,286 people that are required to procreate in order for me to be here typing right now. And that is only dating back to the 1400s!

So, to all those five hundred twenty-four thousand, two hundred eighty-six people, including my parents and grandparents, I just want to say thank you for ... you know...

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Author’s Note #1: I plan on following as many threads as I can as far back as I can just to find the oldest known relative.

Author’s Note #2: I am impressed by how many families were keeping genealogy records hundreds of years ago.

Author’s Note #3: I expect to find a lot more Irish ancestors.