My Personal Book

I have been slowing researching my ancestry, as well as all related trees. It's a monumental project to get it all online and in many ways I've only scratched the surface. Still, in so doing I have connected roughly 16000 other human beings to myself.

There is that saying that you are removed from everyone by 6 degress of separation. The more I do this, the closer I come to believing it. A person on a distant branch 21 steps removed might suddenly become 10 steps removed as a different, more closely related branch, intersects. I have yet to ever find someone more than 30 steps removed, and I once heard that every person on the planet is no more than 50 steps from each other. If true... we really are all just one big happy family.

In doing this, I've found my share of movie stars, pop icons, mayors, villians and heros and some plain fascinating stories. Over time, I hope to feature a few of them here.

I want to make clear that I didn't take courses, or learn how to do things the 'right' way that a trained researcher would. For now, I'm okay with that. It means that there are errors in what I have... probably many. I don't intend this to be the gospel for anyone, and no one should be citing this as a source. I know that I have to go back and do a lot of due diligence and clean up records. At some point, I will. The technology and resources are constantly improving to allow me to do this in an efficient manner. For now, all I can say is that the closer related an individual is to me, the higher the odds that I have taken the time to double check sources and hunt down original records. I also know that my personality lends itself to two skills that come in handy: a desire for things to be 'complete' and 'factual', and a gift when it comes to using search engines and databases. I am very good at ferreting out information. If it is out there and available, odds are good that I will find it, and then challenge the integreity of it when I do.

Something else I've discover is that with so many names, it is now possible to start to pull broad statistics that actually represent a cross section of life. I find it interesting that the male/female ratio rarely varies much from 50%, and that there is a fairly even distribution across the months of the year and zodiac signs as well. You can see from the numbers on the stats though that there are a lot of records with incomplete information.

The reason for the glut of records in one era is this: after 1850, records in North America become pretty reliable and complete by comparison to pre-1850, and prior to 1750, records in any country here or overseas are often hit and miss at best. Post-1911 in Canada, the record trail again goes stale as the privacy act protects most records for the living. Starting in 1994, that starts to open up again as the internet makes obituaries, and other open source information sources more widely available and searchable, not to mention Facebook and other current sources of info. As a result, I find I have a generational gap, with one generation currently lost outside the datasphere. It's coming though, and in time I will close those gaps.

Blue's Book

Want to connect and hear about my current research? I'd love to have a discussion with you. Drop me a message and let me know where you think you fit in!

Statistics

 

Here are some currents stats from the database.