One of Scott Steward’s recent posts reminded me of several conversations I have had with colleagues (not all of them genealogists) on how much we can fill in on our ahnentafeln [German for ancestor tables].
Several staff members at NEHGS have formed a running group called the Runnintafels (my wife came up with the name, and she is not a genealogist). In thinking of ideas for shirts, etc., I queried the team with how “complete” their ahnentafeln were – first 15 ancestors, 31, 63? For the staff who responded this is what I got: Andy Hanson-Dvoracek and Dani Torres had their first 15 (Dani said “the Mexican side gets spotty beyond this”); Ginevra Morse had her first 31 (“Still looking for my 3x great-grandparents on my Italian side”); and James Heffernan and myself both had our first 63 (great-great-great-grandparents). For both James and myself, it’s our Irish ancestors that prevent us from going further, along with my mysterious ancestor John A. Through alias True.
Scott also pointed out how we might be complete or not in terms of filling out births, marriages, and death dates, and this brought up my own journey and struggle there. I first went to Salt Lake City on an NEHGS tour in 1998, when I was a senior in high school. I had been doing my own genealogy for eight years and had already worked one summer for the Research Services. While I had many fantastic results on all sides of my family, the highlight was finding the 1905 marriage in Philadelphia of my great-grandparents, Gilbert Wayne Helman and Mazy Nelson Kelly, shown above.
With this date I had “completed” every birth, marriage, and death date back to my great-grandparents. (While the process of finding this record only took an hour or so, now I could find this on FamilySearch in a few seconds!)
Now nearly 20 years later, I have largely completed the next generation, but there still remains one date that eludes me. This is the marriage in Philadelphia of Mazy’s parents, Thomas Nelson Kelly and Eliza Peltz, who probably married around 1876. I suspect the marriage is somewhere on Family History Library Film #1769064, which remains unindexed and has many certificates of less-than-ideal quality.
Friends have checked unsuccessfully at the Philadelphia City Archives, and I have contacted several churches where they may have gotten married. (The problem: Eliza’s sister married in a United Presybterian Church, her mother was baptized a Lutheran, Thomas was baptized an Episcopalian, and his parents were married in a Scots Presbyterian Church, so who knows the church in which they actually got married.) Oh, well, if I do find the record, the find will be all the more exciting.
While I definitely lose ancestors past my great-great-great-grandparents through both my father and mother, I am remarkably complete through my patrilineal New England ancestors for the full five generations, and so forth back to the seventeenth century:
First I start with me (complete):
Then I just go to my great-great-grandfather Henry Thurston Child (still complete):
Then finally to his great-great-grandfather Henry Child:
By this point everyone is a seventeenth-century immigrant to Massachusetts Bay Colony, or has parents back in the British Isles, and this “spur” of ancestry is complete for twelve generations. The two with unknown parents in the thirteenth – Grace Bett and Robert Harris – are very likely the first of their family in Roxbury, Massachusetts.
So when it comes to “what do I know,” it really depends on what line I’m looking at.
