Calling All Genea-Musings Fans:
It’s Saturday Night Again –
Time For Some More Genealogy Fun!!
Come on, everybody, join in and accept the mission and execute it with precision.
1) Today’s challenge is to answer the question “Who Is the Earliest Ancestor In Your Paternal Tree?
2) Tell us about your earliest paternal ancestor in your family tree on your own blog post, in a comment here, or on your Facebook page. Be sure to leave a link to your report in a comment on this post.
The honest answer to this question is ‘I don’t know’. I have a very deep tree with many colonial lines. Quite a few of those lines go back to New England or New Amsterdam.
My first attempt to figure this out was to look at fan charts. Since many of my paternal linesare deeply colonial, the fan charts did not help find the earliest parternal ancestor. Like Ranky, I have used published works to identify these ancestors.
Since the Fan Charts were not proving helpful, I decided to let RootsMagic find the answer for me. I created a group.
I used the ‘Criteria’ option which allows me to write a rule for my selection.
After selecting CRITERIA from the drop down list, the window now has a button to ‘Edit Criteria’.
I then used the drop downs to write my rule.
Birth date is before 1600
After clicking OK, it shows 43 people in this group. Pressing OK saves the group.
To view the members of the group, I have to change the Index list from Show Everyone to my new group. Thus, I need to click on the downward carrot on the right of Show Everyone to reveal the list of groups.
After selecting my ‘born before 1600’ group I now have a list of 43 individuals in the list.
Since I was looking for the person born the earliest, I created another group. This time the rule stated
birth date is before 1580
Of these 4 individuals, Elizabeth Cowper and Richard Key are 10th great grandparents on my BURKE line. David Powell is a 10th great grandfather on my FOSTER line and Peter Goodwin is a 11th great grandfather on my Briles line, which is a maternal line.