While walking on my treadmill, I often watch YouTube videos. Yesterday’s video was one of Crista Cowan‘s presentations: Family History All Done? What’s Your Number? In the video, Crista demonstrated a way to analyze one’s family tree using an Excel spreadsheet.
Even though I’ve never claimed to be ‘done’ with my genealogy, I was intrigued by this video. Thus, I decided to analyze my own tree containing over 11000 people. In the video, Crista utilized the following column headings:
To make it easier to keep track of who had to be in the starting position on the pedigree when counting the number of people in the ‘5th’ column on the pedigree, I added a column that I titled, ‘pedigree start to count 5th column’. I also added columns to pull cM data from Blaine Bettinger‘s ‘Shared cM Project‘.
I then followed Crista’s directions to fill in the columns: Generation, Relationship, How Many Expected and Common Ancestors to. The next step was to simply count how many people I had in each level of my pedigree. I already knew that I was nowhere near ‘done’ but this analysis revealed exactly where my tree begins to have holes (and lots of them).
Over 10 generations, I only had 224 ancestors out of a potential of 1023. Thus, I have LOTS of work to do!
A good way of looking at it!