The age of ease

[Robert Grumbine]

I was noodling around on the net recently, looking for some more
ancestor leads. Yet again, I hit the pattern of 5-6 generations
back being very difficult. But 8-10 suddenly being vastly easier.
At least in the sense of leads. Sourced leads, being rather a
different matter.

One part is, I wonder if this is something you-all have noticed in
your own work?

A different thing is ... I wonder if it is actually a reasonable
thing. My concern when I first thought about it was that it
represented sloppy or wishful genealogy -- someone with
approximately the right name, in approximately the right place
'must' be the ancestor, so gets filled in. Then I had a second
thought on it, and maybe it's reasonable. Namely, when I'm looking
for someone 5 generations back (call it early-mid 1800s), I'm
looking far enough back that the people now living don't have much,
if any memory of that ancestor. Also, at that remove, the person
has only a moderate number of currently living descendants. I'll
only find prior work if one of that modest number has done some
research already. But what are the chances that they have? Not
impressive.

Make it 10 generations instead of 5, and there are buckets of
current descendants. Chances of at least one of them already having
done some work get to be pretty good.

How does that sound?

--
Robert Grumbine http://moregrumbinescience.blogspot.com/ Science blog
Sagredo (Galileo Galilei) "You present these recondite matters with too much
evidence and ease; this great facility makes them less appreciated than they
would be had they been presented in a more abstruse manner." Two New Sciences

Robert Grumbine <bo...@saltmine.radix.net>