Busy Times
February 14, 2007
I will be entering some busy times for the next week or two and may not be able to keep up my current pace of posting.
Tomorrow, we head off to Phoenix for the Regional Showstoppers Dance Competition. The kids (and Suzanne) are really excited. It’s a weekend away from the house and they get to have some fun dancing. Savannah is really into dancing and takes classes five nights a week. Sean is taking dancing as a way of staying in shape for football and baseball seasons. He really enjoys the break dancing and hip hop dance classes. He recently started taking some Mexican Folklorico dances too and will be doing a duet with Savannah. The local paper ran a nice story today about them going to the competition in Phoenix. That’s another one of those nice things about living in a small rural town.
After the Phoenix trip, I head off on a business trip. Luckily, I will be staying at a hotel right on the oceanside beach. If it wasnt for work, it would be all fun and play.
Since I disabled the Bad Behavior plugin on this site due to it blocking me and other folks, the amount of spam has risen dramatically. Luckily, Akismet continues to block 99% of it. However, the spam bots have caused an increase in my bandwidth usage.
Tonight, I also uploaded an updated family tree file to my genealogy pages. There isnt much in the update but some cleanup stuff and a few minor mods to some folks on the periphery. I haven’t given my genealogy research enough time lately with all my website development work.  I want to change that in the near future. I have several packets of info from folks that I need to go through and make some updates for.
In addition, today I was contacted by another mebmer of the Kott family. She is the great granddaughter of Franz Jacob Kott, who is my great great grandfather. Tonight, we have confirmed the relationship and that we have information to exchange. That won’t happen until after my trips, but its still exciting and I look forward to getting some additional information and hopefully some additional leads.
So, anyways, if it seems slow around here, it will pick back up after my trips.
Genealogy Thoughts
January 7, 2007
A distant relative of mine, John Butler, recently contacted me after finding my genealogy research here at Mr Papa’s World. During the holidays, he sent me a big packet of his genealogy research including a bunch of pictures that included some of Suzanne’s Great-Grandfather.
Today, I had the first opportunity to take a look at the info he sent me. While I really didnt get into the data, one piece of paper he included had some genealogy numbers on it. I found it intriguing as it made me think for a few minutes. The paper was entitled How Lucky Can You Get? and was attributed to Major Robert E Butler. The writing goes a bit over the top about luck and being here, but I found the numbers interesting. The paper is a bit dated from the 1970s, but that would just make the numbers even more staggering. The English in some areas is also lacking, but I wanted to post it exactly as I received it.
Have you ever thought about the odds that you would be here reading this? Prepare yourself for a shock. Obviously, you have am other and a father, and each of them had a father and a mother. This makes you having four recent ancestors, and so on. The following is a chart that reveals how many direct ancestors you had in the 1600′s, assuming births were from 30 year old ancestors.
1 (your self) 1970
2 (parents) 1940
4 (grandparents) 1910
8 (great grandparents) 1880
16 (great great grandparents) 1850
32 (great great great grandparents) 1820
64 (great great great grandparents) 1790
128 (great great great great grandparents) 1760
256 (great great great great great grandparents) 1730
512 (great great great great great great grandparents) 1700
1024 (great great great great great great great grandparents) 1670
If any one of the 1042 ancestors had died before having your specific ancestor was born and had your direct ancestor, some time near the time America was settled by Europeans, your would just not be here reading this.
It gets more mind boggling! If you extend this ancestral chart to the time of William the Conqueror, you would have to have had approximately 8,783,048 direct ancestors.
As a reference, the total population of the British Isles in 1066 AD was about 2 million persons.
So count your blessings and incredible good luck that you are here and reading this!
In my genealogy research, I hadnt really thought about the staggering number of folks I was looking for. Going back to the 1600′s, I have over a 1000 direct ancestors!!:cwy: Add in their families and other distant family members, and the pool of folks is huge. I better get busy!
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