Saturday, October 29, 2011

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun - Where Do You Fit?

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It's Saturday Night again -- and time for more Genealogy Fun!!! 

Your mission, should you decide to accept it, is to:

1)  Use the Population Counter on the BBC News website to determine your place in the current world population, and your place in all of history (of course, these are estimates...see the website for how they calculated this).  Enter your birth date into the fields and click on "Go."

2)  Tell us about your results in your own blog post, as a Comment on this blog post, or as a status line in Facebook or a Stream post on Google Plus.  For extra credit, show us the image from the website with your information on it.

Here's mine:


The site says that when I was born that I was the 2,374,409,904th person alive at that time.  I was also the 75,084,100,723rd person ever born. 

My first thought was "what about other persons born on my birthday?"  Well, they get the same numbers.  My next thought was "how many persons were born on that day?"  I entered the next day into the calculator and got 2,374,472,436 - so the answer is 62,532 persons. 

How about my mother and father?  Dad was number 72,629,532,035 (15 October 1911) and Mom was number 73,173,516,367 (30 July 1919). 

What about persons born today?  The counter says there are 6,996,867,315 alive on 29 October 2011.

My next thought was "Can the Ancestry Member Tree handle 75 billion people?"  It currently has over 2 billion names, but many of those are duplicates.  Ancestry, FamilySearch, Geni, MyHeritage and other family tree sites have a long way to go, don't they? 

Another thought: "Will we ever get to the point where each person that ever lived will have a unique identification number?"  Obviously, it will have to have at least twelve digits! 

There are several other charts that can be seen by clicking the "Next" button  - one for your Country (USA has 484 births per hour, 288 deaths per hour, and adds 113 immigrants every hour, for a 0.9% population growth rate per year).  Average life expectancy in the USA is 78 years, with Females at 80.5 years and males at 75.4 years.  Isn't that great?  Oh no, I have just seven years left to finish up my genealogy work!

8 comments:

Martin said...

It's amazing that we've doubled the earth's population within my lifetime. Scary too.

Mel said...

I did a few family members, too. Here are my results. http://www.researchjournal.yourislandroutes.com/?p=2780

GeniAus said...

I was interested and pleased to see that those of us who live in Australia have a longer life expectancy than our friends in the US, so I have more time to spend on family history!

See my post at: http://geniaus.blogspot.com/2011/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-where-so.html

Liz said...

That was fun, Randy! Thanks for posting it! Here's my contribution:

http://gatapleytree.blogspot.com/2011/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-where-do.html

Sharon said...

My post is at http://genealogymatters2me.blogspot.com/2011/10/saturday-night-genealogy-fun-where-do.html

Wendy said...

Interesting! I'm #2,574,049,084. I share my birthday with 127,966 people.

See my post at http://jollettetc.blogspot.com/2011/10/randy-seavers-saturday-night-fun.html

The New Genealogist said...

I was 5,020,135,297th alive at the time and the 79,934,620,662nd person to have ever lived.

Anonymous said...

Subtracting the number of people ever born for the birthday from the next day value would give you number born. Subtracting number alive on the 2 days does not include deaths of those born on your birthday.