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
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Very interesting and informative article. Congratulations to Kathryn for a great explanation!
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Thank you for sharing this exponentially fascinating information.
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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
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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.
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Love all the information and your amazing work! Thank you!
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Your first chart is missing generation 11 in the first column.
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@BobHaupt Thank you for pointing this out! We will work on an update.
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