A lot of people are usually curious just how big their family tree truly is. As they attempt to trace their ancestry they are unaware of the task that lies ahead. I can actually reveal to you that in actual fact your family tree is really massive. There are actually hundreds if not thousands pf people linked to it from the past and the present.
In order to throw some light on the size and scale of your tree i will describe the structure in a couple of different view points. The first part will to explain your family line going back in history and showing how your tree spreads out as it goes back in time. This way it will be compared to building the skeletal framework of your family tree
.The second stage will be from the past filling out even more. This part will be like putting some flesh on the skeleton and expanding your tree further. The third part will be from the past working our way up to the present day
On completion and when all parts are finished and combined you will be quite astounded so read on family back in Time.
Size Of Family Tree Looking Into The Past
First of all let’s start with you and your present family, specifically your immediate family. You most probably know and grew up with a mother, father and any brothers or sisters. This is usually the starting point for anyone starting out wanting to trace their family tree because you will be closest to and know these members of your family quite well.
You don’t really need me to tell you that to produce a new person into the world you need the partnership of a man and woman to conceive, as this will be the responsibility of your mother and father. So keeping in mind that it will always take two, a man and a woman to produce one.
Before your parents met and got married they were born and raised in their respective families by their parents, known to you as your grand parents. Your father had a mother and father and the same for your mother, this means that you will have 4 grandparents.
Grand Parents and Great Grandparents.
The basic rule applies for your grandparents just as it did for the earlier generations so now you will need eight great grandparents to produce your four grandparents.
As your family tree travels further back in time each generation of parents will spread wider as it will be multiplied by 2 each time. Your four grand parents will be preceded by 8 great grand parents and before before them 16 great great grandparents.
We have now gone back 4 generations in your tree from yourself and you can now see how much it has expanded already. To really appreciate the scale of this expansion lets look at it in better detail.
You
Parents – 2
Grandparents – 4
Great grandparents – 8
2 X Great grandparents -16
3 X Great grandparents – 32
4 X Great grandparents – 64
5 X Great grandparents – 128
6 X Great grandparents – 256
7 X great grandparents – 512
8 X Great grandparents – 1024
9 X Great grandparents – 2048
10 X Great grandparents -4096
Looking at the statistics your tree would look like a large V shape the further back you went So if you went back 15 generations covering maybe 450 to 500 years that would be 131,072 = 15 x Great Grandparents. The result is quite mind blowing even at this point discovering that you all those past ancestors and that is only the tip of the iceberg. What you are in fact looking at is really your lineal Line of descent.
A lineal line in any family tree is where the genetics is passed down through birth to the next generation. This will always be passed down through the family from the previous generations from grandparents to parents to children etc.
The new genes of any one marrying into the family and and producing offspring will contribute the new genes to the new born baby.
Your Past Family Tree Expanding
Now that we have seen how large your tree looks going back in time let’s start from the past and proceed to fill your tree outwards. we shall use one generation as an example and this will be your great ,great grandparents .This part of the the time line will start filling out your tree quite significantly.
Your great, great grandparents undoubtedly had brothers and sisters from their own families. This generation may have lived in the Victorian era where contraception had not yet been invented so there was a tendency to produce large families. It was not unusual for a family to produce in excess eight or more children. These relations obviously became aunts and uncles to the next generation.
In your great, great grandparents generation I have previously pointed out that that you have 16 of them in 8 different families, if you add the potential that they probably had anything from maybe 1 to 5 or more siblings each, you are looking at the range of 100 to 200 great, great uncles and aunts. You must admit that is a large amount of possible ancestors, and even up to that generation, it would take you a long while to try and trace them. Another factor to keep in mind that some of your ancestors from that period may have been an only child, so that may make s difference in the statistics.
The further you go back in your time line, for instance another 2 generations we are mow with your great, great, great, great grandparents, and their sibling ratio will have increased considerably You can now appreciate the possible number of past relatives just from the past uncles, aunts from that period
The Largest Part Of Your Family Tree!
From this point we will now look at your family line from the past up to the present day. This will really put some meat on the framework, and you will then understand how large your tree really is.Just as you have a family today so did your aunts and uncles from the past generations, they were all living their lives coping with their day to day activities. they most likely got married and had children of their own. This will be the start of your line of cousins.
Your cousins have emerged.
The cousin part of your family tree is one of the largest family lines that you will encounter, the numbers are so great that in reality a lot of them you will never meet or even know of their existence, even though they could be living or growing up in the same town or street as you. Just imagine that a best friend, your boss at work or the person that you married could be a long lost cousin from past generations. You will soon learn that this situation is really quite possible!
Your uncle’s and aunt’s from a past generation will eventually marry and start their own families and depending how many of them in that generation they will start the cousin line from that generation. Just one man has the potential to father many children regardless of how many times he gets married, so the scene here is that one man has started expanding your family going forward in time.
Woman will also play their roles at marrying and producing children with their new families, adding more cousins to the equation. The amount of cousins produced from 1 generation can be quite a large number, possibly several hundred.
Take into account that the further back in time you go, 2 or 3 generations that amount can go into a few thousand. That figure may sound quite large and hard to comprehend , but you only have to combine the figures of the 3 phases and the math’s make sense.
Not All The cousins survived.
There are a few factors that can come into the equasion and one of them is the rate of child deaths. Not all of the new born babies or older children survived into adulthood, and a lot of them also never reached their 5th birthday.
A lot of death’s were the result of childhood diseases like measles, diptheria and whooping cough. There were no vaccines invented to counteract the diseases unlike the modern medicines of today, so children were very prone to the effects.
Some children may have been adopted into the family and there is usually no indication as to the parentage of the child, this makes the tree tracing more difficult.
.
The cousin division is so vast that there are several categories, each one is designated to areas like the generation they came from or to whom they are related to. just saying that one cousin is the same as another will not shed much light on which family they belong to. There are such as first cousin, second cousin and one of the most misunderstood category is the once removed , twice removed Etc. When you start looking at all these different cousins their numbers do add up and you are looking at many thousands Concluding all 3 phases.
We have looked at and thoroughly investigated all 3 main areas that make up the possible size and scope of your family tree so let’s put them all together and analyze what the result is. Now you will get a true picture of what your past and present family really is.
In phase 1 we saw how your main pedigree line went back in time and spread out like a giant V shape. This is gaining size in its natural ancestral line putting the skeletal framework to the tree. In phase 2 we started to spread your tree more outwards giving your grandparents, great grandparents and so on their possible siblings that will become your great aunts, great uncles etc. You can see even at this stage that there is some flesh being put on the skeleton. Phase 2 has now filled out your tree several times its and the size has really grown. Phase 3 has now put a lot of descending relatives in the mold of cousins which as you can see has put on a lot of mass to the tree and the final possible size is now coming into view.
As more and more cousins are now emerging into the family tree and the further back in the older generations that they belong they will eventually spread out and start their own families, but the irony of it is that many of them may be marrying their own distant cousins without them realizing. The cousin ratio is so numerous that even your past great grandparents may even be married distant cousins which raises a new question, is a past great grandparent really a distant cousin? Actually they can be both!!
A few other factors for you to think about !
Now that we have established the size of your family tree you must be aware that all of your ancestors and relatives that you discover that are not part of your immediate family will have their own lineal lines that they follow. We will use one of your close cousins for example, a first cousin, the result of your uncle’s marriage. His wife, who will now be your aunt but by marriage only will have her own immediate family from her birth so she will follow a different lineal line.
The line will effect your cousin so now genetic make up will be influenced by her own family line and some of your family line. All of your cousins in your tree and anyone marrying in to your tree throws open lots of different avenues of genetics that will affect later generations.
Your Family past 