How Many Ancestors Do I Have? Connect with Your Family • FamilySearch
How Many Ancestors Do I Have? Connect with Your Family • FamilySearch
Have you ever asked the question, "How many ancestors do I have?" Click the link to discover your ancestors and family roots!
Comments
-
Very interesting and informative article. Congratulations to Kathryn for a great explanation!
0 -
Thank you for sharing this exponentially fascinating information.
0 -
Hi Kathryn,
amazing article thanks so much for the work and grace poured into it.
I do have a question though: in terms of direct ancestors, and there being an estimated 12000 human generations (by mainstream archeology's angle) 2n=x doesn't really work: it is just an obscene number. Perhaps ancestors are more of a bell curve? There being 2 that squares up to a few million and then square roots down again to 2? Super baffled, curious and grateful for being able to ask the question,
Dave
0 -
Hello,
I was kinda breaking my head trying to understand some things.
Google searches tell me that 117 billion people have ever lived on earth.
Goolge searches also tell me that roughly 12000 generations of humans have existed on earth.
If I do a calculation to find out how many ancestors I have going back 12000 generations I get a number that is unfathomably large.
Going back only 50 generations or so the formula does NOT give you a "pretty good approximation"
You mentioned a "wrinkle" effect.. this "wrinkle effect" must also have to be enormous in order to end up with a reasonable number of ancestors going back hundreds of generations.
Perhaps this implies that we all have an enormous amount of "inbreeding" (if the term can still be applied) in our ancestry.
0 -
Love all the information and your amazing work! Thank you!
0 -
Your first chart is missing generation 11 in the first column.
0 -
@BobHaupt Thank you for pointing this out! We will work on an update.
0 -
William the Conqueror is one of my 32nd great-grandfathers. Using the formula, that means I have 17,179,869,184 32nd great-grandparents, but there's never been 17 billion people alive at the same time on this planet. That's a lot to think about.
0 -
I think there is a serious error here. If I live a thousand years ago and I marry, we are two people. We have two kids. Thats four people. Imagine each child goes on to meet a partner and marry and have two kids. I think the result might be your formula, I can easily see how by now I, from a thousand years ago would have over 8000 descendants. The me from now could not possibly have 8000 grandparents as that would take me back to the dinosaurs. I think another adjustment does not take into account that people never lived beyond 50 years old in the dark ages or medieval times, only now are we begining to averagely live to over 70. Another factor might be that due to infant mortality, many of these kids died young, but to compensate, couples had many more kids. Families were larger than now even up to the great war. My nan had loads of siblings. I stopped at three kids but equally my daughter's friends mum had nine kids!! These cannot be classified as grandparents by future generations, only the offspring directly resulting from each of them. I think your pyramid of descendents is upside down. No matter how I attack the problem, I cannot envision your math or its result. Why most family trees appear top heavy with descendents is because people are only concerned with who bore them. If they took the time to work out the descendents of each branch on the tree, the pyramid would have a broad base and anarrower top, it couldn't go any other way. The living population is growing, not shrinking, which I think proves my point.
0
