Saturday Night Genealogy Fun -- A Family's Increase

Randy Seaver of Genea-Musings offers us the following challenge:

Your mission this week, should you decide to accept it, is to:
1) Pick one of your sets of great-grandparents - if possible, the one with the most descendants.

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

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

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.

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

For this exercise, I chose my maternal grandmother’s parents, Julius Jared Pressley and Carrie Williams Pressley.

When Grandpa Pressley died in October 1958, he had three surviving children, eight grandchildren, and one great-grandchild.

When Grandma Pressley died in September 1966, she had three surviving children, eight grandchildren and *several* great-grandchildren, one of which was yours truly. I had just turned two years old.

Though no more grandchildren were born to Grandma and Grandpa Pressley after their deaths.  There were quite a few more great-grandchildren and beyond born.

Here are the numbers by the generations. Those numbers with + after them are the least number of people for that generation.   I know that number for certain.  I know that others are on that generational line, but I do not know how many more.

5 children  - All deceased.
All five of their children were girls.  Only three of them made it to adulthood.  I got a few family stories, opposing viewpoints, from the older sister (my aunt) and the younger sister (my grandma).  I never met the middle sister, according to my mama.

Maggie Pressley Spence & Mae Pressley Worley

9 grandchildren - 3 deceased
One of them was already deceased by the time Grandpa Pressley died. She got an infection and died as a toddler.  One was murdered in his late 30s.  The other one died as an older man, already a grandpa himself.  I have met all of them except for the deceased toddler. 

28+ great-grands - 2 deceased
One great-grandson died as a newborn due to a stomach problem.  He was a first cousin.  One great-granddaughter was murdered as she performed her job as an apartment manager. She was a second cousin, the granddaughter of my grandma's sister. I met her and her three siblings.

21+ 2nd great-grands  I have met quite a few, but nowhere near all, of this generation of children.

4+ 3rd great-grands - 1 deceased
He died as an infant of causes unknown to me. I have not met any of the 3rd great-grandchildren, including my sister's granddaughter. She was born in South Carolina a few years after we moved out here to Texas.

So, that makes an increase of at least 67, but I know the number is far higher. After our move out here to Texas, over a thousand miles away from well over 300 years of family history back in South Carolina, I lost touch with those that I had grown up with.   I know there have been many more baby cousins born since I left South Carolina.  It seems everyone in my generation is a grandparent now except for me!

Some of my cousins that grew up in the state of Washington, I probably met when we were little, but I do not remember them (with one exception and that is because he came to stay the summer with one of my aunts after I got married) and I have no clue how many children or grandchildren any of them have.  I remember my cousins that lived in Virginia because we saw them every few years, but I know nothing about their descendants.

If I can pin down a number for the uncounted folks, I will put an update here on this post.

This assignment was very hard for me to do on several levels.  It certainly revealed to me that I have a whole lot of work ahead of me filling in some empty spots and not nearly enough time left to do it!
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