Saturday Night Fun (on Sunday morning)

Happy Saturday! 

I always enjoy participating in Randy's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenges- (Genea-Musings) 

Tonight, I decided to do one from January 18, 2014- How many Children/Grandchildren in your Matrilineal Line?

Here's the challenge:

1. Consider your Matrilineal Line (mother's mother's mother's, etc.) families- the ones from your mother back through her mother all the way back to the first of that matrilineal line in your family group sheets or genealogy database. List the names of these mothers, and their lifespan years.

2. Use your paper charts or genealogy software program to create a Descendants chart (dropline or graphical) that provide the children and their children. 

3. Count how many children they had (with all spouses), and the children of those children in your records and/or database. Add those numbers to the list.

4. What does this list of children and grandchildren tell you about these persons in your matrilineal line? Does this task indicate areas that you need to do more research to fill out families and find potential cousins?

5. Tell us about it in your own blog post, or in a comment to this post, or in a comment on Facebook or Google+.

Here we go! 

1. My Matrilineal line is: 

~Margaret Mary (unknown) (1740-?)- had 1 daughter, 3 grandchildren 
~Rebecca Cashatt (1783-1862)- had 3 children, 12 grandchildren 
~Hannah Johnson (1806-1878)- had 6 children, 32 grandchildren
~Rebecca J. Ridge (1830-1900)- had 6 children, at least 6 grandchildren

~America Hoover (1859-bef 1880)- had 1 child, 2 grandchildren

~Anna Jane Thornton (1875-1954)- had 2 children, 3 grandchildren

~Ruby Mae Henderson (1901-1990)- had 2 children, 6 grandchildren

~Helen Ruth Seaver (1923-1981)- had 4 children, 13 grandchildren

~My mom (1957- living)- had 3 children, 8 grandchildren (13 grandchildren with step children)


3. I did this by just adding up the number of children and grandchildren in my Ancestry.com account.

4. The list above tells me: 
~When I first started this project, I only had as far back as Anna Jane Thornton. I wanted to include more so I did more research- so this project took me a lot longer than I had anticipated.
~I need to find more information about Rebecca J. Ridge's grandchildren.
~The number of children/grandchildren fluctuate- America Hoover most likely died in child birth so she only had 1 child. I wonder if Margaret Mary was had the same situation. 
~The average number of kids is 3.11.