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March 7, 2016

Create a Fun Ancestor Score Card

Thanks to Tangled Roots and Trees for this fun idea on measuring your genealogy research. First you create an Ancestors Score Card like mine below. I opted to do an 8 Generation Chart but you could list as many or as few as you wish.

 Then you start counting your ancestors in your tree. Fill out the numbers then calculate the percentage. For those who aren't sure how to calculate that, write your numbers as a fraction with the numerator (top number) from the Known column and the denominator (bottom number) from the possible column. Divide numerator by denominator and multiply by 100.

My chart becomes this when I count my known ancestors in each generation:

It's obvious that I have 100% in Generations 1 to 5. For Generation 6, I divide 31 by 32 and multiply by 100 for 96.875% I'll round that off to 97%. Here is my final score card


I don't collect names. It's not about how many ancestors I can find, but I like to see how I'm doing.  I research, find my ancestors one by one, and then I look for their stories. When I'm done I create what I call Family Memory Books consisting of those stories and facts for each person. 





3 comments:

GeniAus said...

A fun exercise. I'll give it a go.

Chris said...

Nice idea, at least it gives you an idea what areas you might need to focus!

Thanks for the tip

Schalene Dagutis said...

Thanks for mentioning my post. I also like to tell the stories of my ancestors and am most proud that the post that calculated my research progress was also my 500th post. I publish books of those posts each year for family members to download.