Catching Up

Wow, this is my first post in about two months. Time passes too quickly. I have been very busy with inventorying, cataloguing, and digitizing family photos and documents along with doing further genealogical research. And also helping the Friends of the Evangelical Protestant Cemetery project. Winter may seem like not the right time to clean-up the cemetery, but believe me, it is. There are no bugs. It is not hot and humid. And the leaves and all greenery are dead which make for easier removal.

One very cool find for me recently was to find the marriage record of one of my 7th great grandparents, Cornelius Adriani Govaerts and Maria Corneli Boterspot. They were married on 07 January 1698 in Meerle, Belgium. Below is a scan of the original record.

Thinking about my find; it is interesting to note how many ancestors we have. In reality looking at the big picture, we really know very little of our family unless you are doing genealogical research. Below I typed some facts about how many direct ancestors we have when tracing back twelve generations.

Everyone person has

(2) parents

(4) grandparents

(8) great grandparents (1 great)

(16) great great grandparents (2 greats)

(32) great great great grandparents (3 greats)

(64) great great great great grandparents (4 greats)

(128) great great great great great grandparents (5 greats)

(256) great great great great great great grandparents (6 greats)

(512) great great great great great great great grandparents (7 greats)

(1024) great great great great great great great great grandparents (8 greats)

(2048) great great great great great great great great great grandparents (9 greats)

(4096) great great great great great great great great great great grandparents (10 greats)

These numbers are only for your direct ancestors. They do not include aunt, uncles, cousins, and spouses. Therefore when tracing your tree backwards and then forward with including all branches of all lines; we can very easily create a very large family tree.