HOW MANY ANCESTORS DO YOU HAVE?
The following material is based on an article which I wrote for Penn Pal, the Newsletter of the Pennsylvania chaper of the Palatines to America .
We have two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. Each generation that we go back multiplies the number of positions on our ancestry chart by two. Let's carry this out to the time of Charlemagne who lived almost twelve Centuries ago. To do this we need to know, approximately, how many generations there are in a century. Three generations per century would put the intergeneration period at 33 years which is too long. Four genertions per century would put the intergenerational period at 25 years which is probably too short. Let's say there are 3 1/2 generations per century. In twelve centuries, there would be 42 generations (12 times 3 1/2).
We need to multiply together forty-two 2s to get the number of needed positions on our ancestor charts. When we multiply ten 2s together we get 1024 so the answer to our problem is 1,024 times 1,024 times 1,024 times 1,024 times 4. Just to make this easier and still stay will within the bounds of our estimation, lets say this is equivalent to 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 x 1,000 x 4 which is 4 trillion. In other words if you were to make an ancestory chart back to the year 800, you would need about four trillion, or 4,000,000,000,000, places on the chart.
Of course, there were not that many people who were living then. [In fact, there are not that many people alive today, and if we counted every person who had ever lived and died, the number wouldn't total that many! GWD] In Europe, there were more than one million people in the year 800 but probably not one hundred million people. Say there were ten million people in Europe. In order to fill up your ancestry chart with names, each person living then, ON THE AVERAGE, would have to appear four hundred thousand times (400,000) on your chart. If you were filling in your chart completely back to the year 800 and if you were writing in names at the rate of one per second, it would take you 125,000 years to fill in your chart.
Of course, some people from then will not appear on your chart. Maybe they left no descendants. Maybe others were outside your lines. Many of the people living then died before they reached the reproductive age. So to keep the average up, some people will appear on your chart more than 400,000 times.
(25 Apr 07)
We gratefully acknowledge the work of John Blankenbaker who published over 2,500 Germanna History Notes via the Germanna-L@rootsweb.com email list from 1997 to 2008. We are equally thankful to George Durman (Sgt. George) for hosting the list and republishing the notes via rootsweb.com.