How Many People are in my Family Tree

cowboydaniel

Sort of like ancestry, I'd love to know how many people are linked to my family tree. Where can I find this?

Graham Buckell

Depends how you define it:

1. Director ancestors only
2. Direct ancestors plus siblings
3. Direct ancestors plus siblings with their spouses
4. As 3. plus descendants.
5. As 4 plus spouses of descandants
6. As 5, plus parents of spouses
7. As 6 plus ancestors of spouses
8. Etc

1,2 and 3 are not too difficult to count. The best way is probably to use a family tree software package that links with FamilySearch. See Solutions Gallery – Family Tree Management

Going beyond that gets more challenging!

Gordon Collett

Just assume it is too big to be meaningful or useful information. Since FamilyTree is a single, unified, community, world-wide tree, you potentially connect into the most-connected section of the database which contains, according to a RootsTech speaker, about 825,000,000 people.

Now if you don't mean connected to but rather related to, that is when you click "View My Relationship" in the tree you get a result that would be a smaller number because the routine only goes back 15 generations then forward again. But to give you some idea, I do connect into that 825,000,000 person connected section of the tree and from that pool, I was told I had about 45,000 (I don't remember the exact number) living people who registered for RootsTech with whom I could show a relationship within 15 generations. This would clearly be a minority of my living relatives. Add all the deceased direct line relatives and all the cousins of various sorts, and the number balloons quickly.

Áine Ní Donnghaile

In addition to the comments above, you can see the people you have added to the FamilySearch Family Tree in the My Contributions section of the FSFT.