Does it all add up ? How many ancestors do you really have ? 2 Parents, 4 Grandparents, 8 Great-Grandparents, 16 Great-Great-Grandparents, 32 3 x Great-Grandparents, 64 4 x Great-Grandparents, 128 5 x Great-Grandparents, 256 6 x Great-Grandparents, 512 7 x Great-Grandparents, 1,024 8 x Great-Grandparents, 2,048 9 x Great-Grandparents, 4,096 10 x Great- Grandparents etc. If we go back another ten generations you would have 4,194,304 20th x Great Grandparents. If every generation is approximately 30 years that is over 600 years of history and makes the number of relatives you had in 1400 over four million, so what does this mean, will you have over four million names at that stage, assuming you havent given up by then :-) Various sources suggest that the UK population in 1400 was about 2.1 Million, so this must mean somewhere in your tree you probably have relatives / cousins who married and hence duplicate grandparents. In my own tree this happened when my paternal 3 x Great Grandparents (who were cousins) married and their lines from then back are duplicated. So the good news from this is that you can find you have less research to do than the numbers above indicate and if you do find you have cousins who married then dont worry, it just saves you work. :-)
Posted on: Sat, 18 Oct 2014 08:58:45 +0000
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