Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Finding Descendants of Rudolph Spangler (1738-1811) In the FamilySearch Family Tree

Every so often, I pick one of the 32 pairs of my 4th great-grandparents and go look in the FamilySearch Family Tree for descendants that I don't have yet in my RootsMagic database.  These are my 5th cousins or closer - folks whose descendants could show up in my autosomal DNA matches on AncestryDNA, FamilyTreeDNA and 23andMe.

Rather than pick through the FamilySearch Family Tree one family at a time, I use www.Puzzilla.org to show me the extent of these descendants of each of my 4th great-grandparents.  Puzzilla accesses the current version of the FamilySearch Family Tree and displays either ancestors or descendants of a specific person.  It is an ideal way to see how many descendants of a person are in the Family Tree.

Here is my Puzzilla ancestor chart for six generations with me as the number one person:


Before I made the screen capture above, I clicked on Rudolph Spangler (1738-1811) (the green dot on the screen above) and my ancestral path back to him is shown in the left-hand box on the screen above.

When I clicked on Rudolph Spangler, the chart changed - I chose "Descendants" and then 5 generations and the chart was built of the descendants of Rudolph Spangler for 5 generations:


If you look closely you can see a yellow "thread" in the lower right-hand area of the screen above - that is the path from Rudolph to me.  The 5th generation descendant where the thread ends is my mother, Betty Virginia Carringer (1919-2002).  I zoomed in on the chart to more clearly show the detail - each one of those think black lines is a descendant of Rudolph Spangler:


There is a color code here - blue square is a male, red circle is a female, yellow is a person who died before age 16, and gray is a person born less than 110 years ago.

I tried to count the number of descendants in each generation:

*  1st generation = 12
*  2nd generation = 56
*  3rd generation =  228
*  4th generation = 276
*  5th generation = 221

That adds up to 793 descendants in the FamilySearch Family Tree.  Now, not every person who is a descendant of Rudolph Spangler is in the FamilySearch Family Tree - there are "holes" in the chart above where there are probably more descendants than are shown in the chart, but they have not been identified yet.  When I look at the information for most of those persons in the chart, I see that there are usually birth and death dates and places for almost all of them, input by descendants or researchers over time.  I've done some of them, and I continue to do more as I find them.

My research goal is to add most of these descendants to my RootsMagic database because they are my cousins.  I will search for records of many of them so as to add source citations to their profiles in my RootsMagic database and in the FamilySearch Family Tree.  My hope is that through the search I will find more descendants and be able to add them to the FamilySearch Family Tree.

This Spangler descendants tree is one of the more populated trees for my 32 pairs of 4th great-grandparents.

Interestingly, I know of only two matches on AncestryDNA who are descended from Rudolph Spangler and his wife, as determined by the "Shared Matches" feature.  That means there are lots of possibilities for more, but the matches have to do the test and have a tree that shows a Shared Match with me.

=====================================

Copyright (c) 2016, Randall J. Seaver

Please comment on this post on the website by clicking the URL above and then the "Comments" link at the bottom of each post.  Share it on Twitter, Facebook, Google+ or Pinterest using the icons below.  Or contact me by email at randy.seaver@gmail.com.

No comments: