Is there any way of counting the number of descendants of a particular individual in Family Tree?

LegacyUser

Paul said: I just made a comment, in another thread, that I have added / am working on "many hundreds" of WRIGHTSONs in Family Tree. Out of interest, is there any way of calculating the number of descendants from a given person, either using Family Tree or a certified program? I did have a go just now, but got thoroughly mixed-up trying to go manually through all the different branches from my 8x great grandfather. Specifically, I'm only interested in those who kept the WRIGHTSON surname, but maybe this complicates the issue further.

Sounds a bit trivial, I know, but I've always been quite hung-up on statistics! Hoping I won't look too stupid (no comments, please) if there is a straightforward way I've overlooked.

LegacyUser

Tom Huber said: I use Ancestral Quest (I have no interest in the company, other than a user of their product) and can download all the descendants of a given ancestor. It takes a while if you start a lot of generations back, but once done, you will have a count of all the people in the new database.

It is my understanding that the free version can do this... It is also my understanding that each of the big three, which includes Roots Magic and Legacy also have this ability to download all the descendants and that to be fully certified, their free version has to do this.

I'm not sure about the certification requirement, since I have no access to the requirements.

LegacyUser

Paul said: Thanks, Tom. I have Ancestral Quest and the free version of Roots Magic, so suppose I should have looked there first, before bothering people (well, you!) on this forum.

Thanks again - I'll give your suggestions a try.

AndrewEClark

Were you able to get a descendant count using the methods described above? Please let us know if you solved your problem –and if so, how you ended-up accomplishing it.

Gail Swihart Watson

This number will certainly be incorrect. It will never include anyone marked living. Most of the time recent generations are not found on the tree, even when deceased, because no one is interested in the family history.

genthusiast

@AndrewEClark There is not a method/feature within Family Tree to calculate the number - nor specific surname - descendancy of a particular couple. The descendancy tree view is about the closest result to this request - but as with everything else in the tree will depend upon accuracy of persons entered. If you have conducted your own descendancy research and entered such in a third party tree management solution - as mentioned above - you can sort/filter descendants of a particular couple into a list - and thereby count the results. Again that number is dependent upon accuracy of research.

dontiknowyou

I work mostly with descendancy trees. To get the size of a descendancy tree the best method I have found is:

1. Install the no-cost basic version of RootsMagic on a desktop computer.
2. In RootsMagic import the descendancy tree from FamilySearch Family Tree.
3. To learn how RootsMagic works, first do test runs on a small descendancy tree.
4. Import of a large descendancy tree can take days or weeks to complete, so plan accordingly. This long run time is due to export throttling by FamilySearch. For economy de-select all data inclusion options.
5. RootsMagic will say exactly how many profiles it imports.

Of course, RootsMagic won't see any branches of the descendancy tree in other contributors' private tree space, or that have not been entered in to Family Tree at all.