#52 Ancestors 2022 Week 29 Fun Facts: The Ancestor Hunt

This is just a quick look at how I am doing in tracking down my ancestors, after about 40 years of working on it. And God bless my grandmother Summers and great-grandmother Scrivener who were avid genealogists and left me a wonderful inheritance of family information.

I'm doing pretty well on the first 6 generations. In fact, I know exactly the two women I am missing in Generation 6 and I recently wrote about my frustrating attempts to nail down the name of one of my 4X-great-grandmothers, Mrs. Henry Boswell. 

I’m also not too bad on generation 7 (5X great-grandparents). That takes me back to about the early18th-century (1700) or so.  Most of these folks were living in Maryland or at least in the mid-Atlantic area, so somewhat easier for me to research, since I still live in Maryland and Maryland has done a great job of preserving its early records. 

After that, my success rate drops off, although I am helped somewhat by the fact that there was a lot of intermarriage among my ancestors' families. You know, two brothers who married two sisters. Or cousins who married cousins.  Seems to be a popular pastime in Southern Maryland. So, there are a fair number of duplicate names on these lists. Also, a few of these people were wealthy and therefore left better records, like wills and land purchases. 

Alas, some of my 18th-century ancestors did not have the common decency to write down their parents' names in a conveniently located document!  Or even worse, they chose to live in an area that is prone to courthouse fires. Poor planning on their part, but a challenge that keeps me endlessly entertained as I try to track them down. 

(Note to future generations: please see that your parents' names are chiseled on your tombstone, especially if you are not buried right next to them, much less in a different state. Also, please name all of your children in your will, even if you don't like some of them, and make sure your will is in a nice fireproof safe.--You do have a will, don't you?--Your great-grandchildren will thank you.)

I do know some of the ancestors in generations 11 and 12, but it got too tedious trying to count them, so I quit while I was ahead, so to speak. I will try to catch up with those numbers later. Until you get to actually counting them, it's easy to forget how many ancestors were needed to bring you into this world!

I will try to remember to repeat this next year so I can see if I have made any progress in finding those elusive 7X great grandparents. If only I had another 40 years.  Sigh!

The Ancestor Hunt 2022

Generation	Number of Members	Number Found	Percentage
1.       Parents	2	2	100
2.       Grandparents	4	4	100
3.       Great Grandparents	8	8	100
4.       2X Grandparents	16	16	100
5.       3X Grandparents	32	32	100
6.       4X Grandparents	64	62	97
7.       5X Grandparents	128	114	89
8.       6X Grandparents	256	158	62
9.       7X Grandparents	512	249	49
1.   8X Grandparents	1024	294	29
1.   9X Grandparents	2048
1  10X Grandparents	4096