This week’s 52 Ancestor’s prompt is longevity. I’ve never looked a the life expectancy of my ancestors before. To figure out an average life expectancy, I decided to export data from RootsMagic and calculate the average life expectancy for my direct line ancestors.
For the export I created a custom report showing their name, birth date and death date.
To generate the report, I selected myself and then created a ‘marked group’ of my ancestors for 10 generations. I then exported the report as a ‘txt’ file so that I could import it into Excel. [Note: If doing this again, I would have added gender to the report.]
Once in Excel, I wanted to calculate the age. Since some of my ancestors did not have a specific death year or birth year, I deleted them. I then pulled the year from the date fields and converted any text into numbers so that I could subtract to get an approximate age at death.
I had birth and death years for 96 ancestors. The average age for those 96 ancestors was 68 years.
Out of curiosity, I then looked at how many died in their thirties, forties, fifties, etc.
