Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- Make a Descendant's List of Second Great-Grandparents

 Calling all Genea-Musings Fans: 

 It's Saturday Night Again - 

Time For Some More Genealogy Fun!!

Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision. 

1)  How complete is your family tree?  Do you have information about your cousins  - both close and more distant?  Today's challenge is to take one set of your 2nd great-grandparents and make a Descendants List (using your genealogy management program - e.g., Family Tree Maker, RootsMagic, etc.)

2) Tell us about your choice of 2nd great-grandparents, and tell us approximately how many descendants of them that you have in your family tree database. Share your answers, and perhaps a chart, on your own blog or in a Facebook post.  Please leave a link on this post if you write your own post.

Here's mine:

I chose my paternal second great-grandparents, James Richman (1821-1912) and Hannah Rich (1824-1911).  I requested a 6-generation Descendants List in RootsMagic.  The result was 26 pages with about 16 names on each page.  So there are about 420 names, of which maybe 280 are descendants (I didn't count them...).  Here is the first page of my Descendants List (note that the spouses of descendants are also listed):

I also did a Descendants List for my paternal second-great-grandparents Isaac Seaver (1823-1901) and Lucretia Smith (1828-1884).  That resulted in a 6 page Descendants List, so about 100 persons.

On my mother's side, my second great-grandparents David Jackson Carringer (1828-1902) and Rebecca Spangler (1832-1901), has only 27 names on the list because my mother and my maternal grandparents were only children.  

I did the other five sets of 2nd great-grandparents and saved them all to a word document and a file folder.

My RootsMagic family tree is fairly complete for the descendants of my second and third great-grandparents.  I'm still working on the descendants of my 32 sets of my 4th great-grandparents.  It is difficult to find much information about living persons, and that was one reason I limited the reports to 6 generations from the 2nd-great-grandparents - the last generation includes my children's generation but not later generations.  

The value of these Descendants Lists is that you can determine the relationship between the people that you share ancestry with.  These are persons that you, your parents and your grandparents corresponded with throughouttheir lives, and the descendants may have photographs, letters, stories, memories, and family artifacts that you don't have.  They are also persons that should appear on your autosomal DNA matches if you and they have tested.  

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