Descendancy Reports

Do you research the descendants of your ancestors? Over the years, I’ve learned that the more I know about the children of an ancestor and the families of those children, the easier it is to locate information about the ancestor. Thus, my genealogy file contains information on a lot of descendants. And that research has paid off in terms of identifying DNA matches.

Thus, some of my goals for 2021 were to research the descendants of my 6th great grandfathers on my father’s side of my tree.

• Nelson G. Crawford and Martha Smith
• Zebulon Foster and Caroline Ostrander
• Horatio Hammond and Louisa Fisk
• James Ralston and Nancy McCormick
• Hiram Currey and Rachel Harris
• Henry Burke and Elizabeth Bland
• Aaron Hutchinson and Sarah Merry
• William Harding and Elizabeth Fowler

Most of this ‘research’ was simply going thru the Ancestry hints for the descendants. At times, I searched for other records to help document the lives of these cousins. This time consuming research resulted in a blog post listing these descendants.

Thanks to my genealogy software, creating those reports is relatively simple. With the release of RootsMagic 8, those reports have changed slightly. The Descendant list report has several different formats available.

• Name (birth date – death date)
• Name/Birth/Death in columns
• Name/BMD Date/Place
• Name (birth year-death year)
• Name/BMD Date/Place wordwrap

My favorite version is the wordwrap version. I like this version because it has more information in a format that makes the family levels easy to visualize.

Unfortunately, this format creates challenges when I try to copy/paste the information from one of these reports into a blog post.

I haven’t tried to copy/paste a columns report, but I think it would be even more of a challenge to create a blog post using this format.

That leaves three formats with varying levels of information: years, dates and dates with places.

Name (Birth year – Death year)

Name (birth date – death date)

Name/BMD Date / Place

Since I believe that knowing the place in relation to a date is important, I will likely use the Name/BMD Date/Place format for future descendancy list reports. As I work thru my goal to complete these descendancy reports, I know that the research involved is valuable but I question the value of posting these reports. What about you, reader, have you ever connected with a cousin thru a descendancy report?