The "A Family's Increase" Saturday Night Genealogy Challenge

This weeks Saturday Night Challenge post along with links of those who participated can be found HERE.  The questions are listed prior in italics prior to my answers. 

1) Pick one of your sets of great-grandparents - if possible, the one with the most descendants.

Georgia Shepler (1886-1967) and Harve Rairigh (1884-1956)

Georgia and Have Rairigh are my mother's grandparents on her father's side. 

My father's mother had one brother and my father's father was an only child.  My mother's mother had five siblings but I am not as informed on those lines and do not know them well enough to get information from living people on living people.  So I chose my mother's father's family because that is who I know as family from my mother's relatives. 

2) Create a descendants list for those great-grandparents either by hand or in your software program.

I used my Reunion Family Tree Software to create a descendant list.  

3) Tell us how many descendants, living or dead, are in each generation from those great-grandparents.

1 - Children - Two (both deceased)

2- grandchildren - Six - (two deceased)

3-great-grandchildren - Twenty - two - (one deceased)

4- great-great-grandchildren - Thirty-eight - (two deceased)

5- great-great-great-grandchildren - fifteen - (one deceased)

6- great- great-great-great- grandchildren - zero 

 

4) How many are still living? Of those, how many have you met and exchanged family information with? Are there any that you should make contact with ASAP? Please don't use last names of living people for this - respect their privacy.

I have 83 descendants listed for the  great grandparents I chose for this exercise and I have 77 of those descendants listed as still living.  I keep in loose contact with my first cousins.  It has been several years since I obtained updated family information and photos from my cousins regarding their grandchildren and I know from Facebook posts that number five's list needs updated.  I need to email them all and send them what I have for each of their families and ask for corrections and updates again.  It has been over five years already since I have done so.  But I don't think it has been ten years since we worked together for an update of information for my records.  

5) Write about it in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments or a Note on Facebook.

This was challenging for me.  Trying to hand count through the descendant list started to get confusing so I won't promise I did it right.   What was really interesting to me is that my family on this side stays true with the national pattern of a baby boom in my generation and then a decrease in the size of the families from there for each generation.