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Wednesday, August 25, 2010

GETTING A HEAD COUNT

As I've been entering the Ellingwoods onto my Ancestry Family tree,
I began to wonder about just how many descendants my greatgreat
grandfather Asa Freeman Ellingwood had sired, and how would I
go about finding out the total number. When I voiced that thought
on Facebook a few weeks back, someone (I can't recall who now)
suggested I ask Bruce Buzbee, creator of RootsMagic 4 himself.
So I sent him a message with my question and got this answer
back: 

"Bill,

There isn't a tool that directly does that, but here's a way.


1. Do Reports > Lists > Statistics list
2. Choose to include selected people
3. Highlight the starting person in the list that appears,

then click "Mark group", and then choose "Descendants of the
highlighted person". You can choose whether to include spouses in 
that count.
4. Click OK and then generate the report.

It will give you a count of how many descendants, how many are 

male vs female, and other statistics about those descendants."


Now this was back on July 25th and I've been working on the tree
since then, but finally finished with the Asa Freeman Ellingwood
descendants on Ancestry. Tonight I created a gedcom of my tree
and downloaded it to my computer, then imported it to the RM4
as a new file. Adding it to my existing RM4 database would have
resulted in duplicate entries. I then followed Bruce's instructions,
choosing Asa Freeman Ellingwood for the starting person and
choosing not to count spouses of his descendants. This is how
the screen looked when it generated the report:


The count came to 204, not including living descendants who I had not
listed on the Ancestry tree.

I'm still working on the families of Asa's siblings but out of curiosity I ran
a list of the descendants of their father and mother, John  Ellingwood
and Rachel Barrows. Again, I chose to omit the spouses and this does
not include living descendants:

 
The count at this time is 323 individuals. Both totals will go up when I
add living descendants to the database.

Thanks for the help, Bruce!

Do other genealogy programs have a way to give you actual number of
a person's descendants?

1 comment:

A rootdigger said...

That is good to know. I need to do something like that. At least I can learn it.