Article 16979 of soc.roots: Newsgroups: soc.roots Path: kth.se!sunic!uunet!utcsri!newsflash.concordia.ca!hobbit.ireq.hydro.qc.ca!beaurega From: beaurega@ireq.hydro.qc.ca (Denis Beauregard) Subject: The largest anstry is (50000?) (was Re: Answer to Guy Cherry) Message-ID: Sender: news@ireq.hydro.qc.ca (Netnews Admin) Organization: Institut de recherche d'Hydro-Quebec, Varennes, Canada References: <01GVAXUZQ71C8WWA4V@TSU.BITNET> Date: Wed, 10 Mar 1993 22:28:07 GMT Lines: 60 In article <01GVAXUZQ71C8WWA4V@TSU.BITNET> LUCK02%TSU.bitnet@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU writes: >You asked about statistics, well Gen #1 is two people, G2=4,G3=8..... >G9=512,G10(About 200 years?)=1024. 1024 ancesters in 10 generations also >means that each of the 1024 going back 10 more generations also have 1024 >each that is 1024*1024= A heck of alot of relitives. If you keep going in >this vein, you will have more relatives in any one century than there were >people on earth. But, thankfully, you have multiple lines (descended from >relative "X" maybe by four lines) which take care of alot of the math. >But it is no wonder that people can have 10000 people in their database and >only gone back a few generations. I can not claim expertise in the above math, >I got it from -APPLIED GENEALOGY- by Eugene Straton, a very good book (I think) > It contain other interesting stats. Good Hunting. > Kevin Luck > Luck02@TSU.Bitnet Here are some realistics figures. In New France, French government decided to make of it a model colony. Thus, we have probably the most complete set of ancestors records in the world. After British conquest, the catholic church that was in charge of taking records continued the same system, which made of Quebec the best land for records. My own ancestry is about 2000-3000 people. I added a few more from a few lines that go thru French nobility, but this added only 500 people. We can extrapolate to a maximum as: 20 year/generation, thus 1650-1990 is 340 years or 17 generations. 2^17 = 130k. But, there where only 10000 settlers, so the last generation is 10k. Next is 20k max. That gives 2^15 = 32k ancestors to 1690, plus 20k for generation before, that is the "record" in number of known and documented ancestors would be 50k. Nobility is similar to Quebec situation in that even if the records are missing, there are many books that survived with the same data. Moreover, there will be more lines because of nobility books. In the other side, nobility is a social class, that is they married together when they could (i.e. inside the same social class). Sometimes, they married cousins, but this is a usage only in very high class, that is there were a few kingdoms, so a king willing to marry his daughter with a prince had little choice. But, at earl/baron/count/lord level, the choice in "not cousins" was greater. Despite of this, I estimate the effect of reducing the number of "documented" ancestors is greater in nobility than in early Quebec people because early Quebec records included every people, not just one social class. So, if "complete" genealogy could include up to 50000 people, that is I estimate that the largest documented genealogical tree for a human in 1993 to be less than that. Any compiler to find who has the record? Hint: build a record with pre-1800 people with the highest number of ancestors (say 100 persons) and check among their descendants who have the more ancestors. Hint2: preprocess data with parents/children marriage under 25 years. P.S. For the number of descendants, I think the record we have in Quebec is about 2100 descendants known in 1730, that is for parents married I think in about 1615. -- \_\ Denis Beauregard * internet:beaurega@ireq.hydro.qc.ca / \ Genealogiste des familles : Beauregard/Jarret/Jarest/Vincent J __> Un Quebec renouvele dans une Amerique renovee \_.-=== Operateur de "Racines du Quebec" (514) 922-9636 BBS/Genealogie