Blessed ancestors


I was fascinated by this analysis of my ancestry, based on data in FamilySearch. It shows the country of birth for all my predecessors, 8 generations back. My mother and father are the two halves of the inner circle, and each succeeding generation fans out from there.
I am proud of the color analysis (but sad about the black segments which represent ancestors not yet identified). My mother was born in Germany, and the predominantly red left side of the chart are her predecessors. This side would be even more red, but some of the place names apparently were not recognized as being from Germany (Ulm, Wuerttemberg). Two generations (light blue, upper left) actually had birthplaces in Pennsylvania before returning to Germany.
The right side, my paternal ancestry, is more diverse. The lower quarter, my paternal grandmother, were born mostly in the USA with immigrants further back from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England. My paternal grandfather, upper right quarter, was born in Samoa with ancestors from Canada, Australia, England, Scotland, and Ireland.
It's interesting to realize that I have 256 sixth-great grandparents, born in the late 1600s or early 1700s. I have a total of 510 predessors in these 8 generations. That's quite a crowd in the matter of 300 years!
All 510 of these people are no longer on this earth. I personally knew only 4 of them in my life - my parents and my two grandmothers. I know something of the lives of a few dozen others. But most of them are mysterious, unknown, just names and a little data on the screen.
Yet, each one of these 510 people was born in this world, grew and learned, survived in sometimes very challenging conditions, reached adulthood, married, and helped create at least one child. As children, they were trained, taught and guided; as parents, they tried to pass on values and heritage. They had challenges, dreams, struggles, beliefs, doubts, fears. They felt love, hope, worry. I am a product of all 510 of them, genetically, and in some way also culturally, intellectually, spiritually. Only four of them saw any portion of my life; most never imagined any aspect of me, but perhaps had some inkling I would exist (a vague entity among crowds of their descendants), just as I know I will have descendants I will never know but will be a part of me.
It's a fascinating thought, these crowds of ancestors. And the 510 of 8 generations are a small fraction of the myriad that preceded them. I #GiveThanks for them, for their lives, for their part in my life. Though I will never fully understand what they experienced in this world, I believe I will meet them some day and come to know more about them. How fascinating to imagine that!
PS - try this application on your own ancestry. It's much better online, because you can "mouse over" each position and see the name and vital statistics of the person. It was produced by the BYU Family History Technology Lab. Go to:
And PS - I suggest you turn off the switch near the top that says "Predict Unknowns" - that fills in the blanks for unknown ancestors and can skew the appearance.

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