Sunday 12 January 2014

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - What's Your Ancestor Score?

It’s a week late, but this is my first SNGF post.

Randy Seaver from Genea-Musings posted the following SNGF challenge - What's Your Genealogy Score on 4 Jan:

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (and I hope more of you do than participated in the last several SNGF challenges), is to:

1.                  Determine how complete your genealogy research is.  For background, read Crista Cowan’s post FamilyHistory 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 think this would be a good exercise to do every year or so in order to see how my research has progressed.

I haven’t got into using reports on my genealogy software yet, but I do regularly update my own Ahnentafel Table I created in Word.  I like using the Ahnentafel Numbering System & this document helps me to keep track of who I’ve identified, which generation they are in, which of my 4 main lines they belong to (i.e. father’s father, mother’s mother, etc) & their relationship to me very easily.  It also helped me to determine how many ancestors I know in each generation for this exercise.

I think I’ve done well in my research up to, & including, the 8th generation, but as you can see from the data trends on my 9th & 10th generation, there was no point going further back.  No extra credit for me (this year at least!).

Here is my ancestor table:


What's your Ancestor Score?



1 comment:

  1. I have seen this before but never done it for myself. I have now looking at making a Genealogy Plan for the next months and one of my goals will be to improve my score!

    Thank you for the prompt

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