This week's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge has been put forth by Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings, and once I read it, I immediately knew which set of great-grandparents I would use. Here are the details: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.
And here is what I have to present:
1) I've selected the great-grandparents who I knew and who had a huge influence on my childhood - John Ralph Austin (31 Jan 1896 - 20 April 1976) and Therese Rose McGinnes (6 Apr 1894 - 25 Apr 1988).
2) I used Family Tree Maker 2009 only because I am in the middle of re-entering my database in RootsMagic 4 (call me crazy) and can't run the report from there.
3) The descendants, using Randy's neat "by generation" listing:
1. Children = 3 (1 still living)
2. Grandchildren = 15 (1 deceased)
3. Great-grandchildren = 32 (1 deceased)
4. Great-great-grandchildren = 37 (1 deceased)
5. 3rd great-grandchildren = undetermined
4) The total is 87 but I know there are more. I have a bad habit of not keeping up with the living especially if they aren't on the Internet. One of my goals has been to do a mailing this Christmas with forms and prepaid postage to gather recent data on births, deaths, etc.
Most the great-grandchildren are around my age, any where from 50 to about 30 years of age. Their children have just started to have children of their own in the past 5 years or so - my estimate is that there must be at least 10 more descendants for whom I've not yet accounted.
Photo: Therese McGinnes Austin and Ralph Austin. Grahamsville, New York, abt 1946. Digital photograph. Privately held by Thomas MacEntee, [ADDRESS FOR PRIVATE USE,] Chicago, Illinois. 2009.
© 2009, copyright Thomas MacEntee
2 comments:
I've planned to send out something to distant cousins the last two years. Maybe I'll get it together this year.
Thomas, I know the feeling. My Dad's family was not a close one; it is hard to keep in touch with people you have not met, and really don't know. I imagine they call me, "That crazy lady that wants to know too much" or something like that.
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