How Many Ancestors Are You Missing Per Generation? Is a great question and the other day I was wondering as to how many ancestors there are per generation and how many of them were missing.
I made a quick list, nothing fancy as you can see. I quickly realized that had no idea as to how to figure out how many ancestors I was missing per generation.
I tried looking for a program that could tell me how many ancestors I have found per generation but could not find one.
The best thing was the 9 generation chart I printed a few weeks ago. From the chart I could easily see that I had all my ancestors up to generation 6 and then on the 7th I was missing four ancestors.
I counted 41 missing ancestors from the 8th generation. Then on the 9th I was missing 104. After that there is no easy way to count them. If you have any ideas please let me know.
On generation one I started with my self, then generation two my parents, generation three my great-grandparents and so on.
- Gen 01: 1
- Gen 02: 2
- Gen 03: 4
- Gen 04: 8
- Gen 05: 16
- Gen 06: 32
- Gen 07: 64 – I am missing only 4 ancestors
- Gen 08: 128 – I am missing 41 ancestors
- Gen 09: 256 – I am missing 104 ancestors
- Gen 10: 512
- Gen 11: 1024
- Gen 12: 2048
- Gen 13: 4096
- Gen 14: 8192
- Gen 15: 16384
- Gen 16: 32768
- Gen 17: 65536
- Gen 18: 131,072
- Gen 19: 262,144
- Gen 20: 524,288
On generation ten you are looking at your 7th Great grandparents and on generation 20 you are looking at your 17th great-grandparents. If you count everyone including your self you have a total of 1,048,575 persons in your family tree. Don’t forget that these numbers are not unique ancestors. Many of them will overlap. For example by Generation 9 some of my ancestors repeat themselves several times.
Number of Ancestors in a Given Generation
Here is a link to a very interesting post that Eleanor Salas Barajas shared on our Facebook Group: Number of Ancestors in a Given Generation make sure to bookmark it or print it for future reference.
I as of today I have a few lines going back 20 generations and only have found about 900 ancestors in total. In my own estimates, I think I have enough research left for a few lifetimes.
How about you? How Many Ancestors Are You Missing Per Generation?
Do you know how many ancestors you are missing per generation? Let me know in the comments.
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