Saturday into Sunday Genealogy Fun

I know it's now Sunday afternoon but I still wanted to participate in this week's SNGF challenge from Randy Seaver, Genea-Musings.

The instructions for this week were as follows:

1) Pick one of your four 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.

1) I chose my great grandparents Monroe Barto Hosch (Born 1862 and died sometime bwt. 1890 and 1900) and Sallie (Rome) Hosch (Born abt 1868 and died sometime bwt. 1890 and 1900)

2) Children = 3

All are deceased although no one knows when, where, or how for my great uncle Hosea.

3) Grandchildren = 26

Granddad had 8 and my great Uncle Will had 18. Five are still living.

4) Great Grandchildren = 83 (at least)

Granddad had 29 grandchildren and Uncle Will had ???

At the great grand level, my generation, is where it begins to get a bit tricky because I don't have all the information for all my great uncle's descendants. So the above was my best guesstimate based on information at hand (2 of his 18 children had 22) and making a few assumptions, like an average of 2 children for Uncle Will's other 16 children that I don't have information on (as you can see while both lines migrated to NC, we don't communicate). If anything, the 83 is extremely low.

I know 11 of the great grands are deceased. I'm sure there is more than that but those are the ones that I know.

5) Great-great-grandchildren = 57+

I just did my granddad's line because of the already mentioned problems with my great Uncle Will's line, which is why there is a + added to the 57. To the best of my knowledge, only one of the great-great grands in my granddad's line has died but with such a huge family tree just on granddad's line, I'm sure I'm missing some.

Also, I'm going to stop at this point because, you can easily see how this is escalating into messiness with each generation.

So at a minimum, my great-grandparents have a 169 descendants just 3 generations later, although I would suspect that number is much higher than that. Have I met all of them? Surely you jest, I haven't even met all the descendants just in my granddad's line, much less my great Uncle's line. I met all my aunts and uncles, and considering I grew up with most of them around, I have met all of my first cousins and I've even met most of my first cousin's children, the 3rd great grands, because many of them were closer in age to me than my first cousins (heck some were even older than me). However, from the 4th great-grands on, no. Some, I imagine don't even know about this part of their family tree as I doubt that it was even passed on to them and sadly, most probably aren't even curious.

I've met some of the descendants of my great Uncles - 7 of his children (grands), 5 of his grand children(great grands) and none of the descendants after that.

One day I would like to find out what happened to my great Uncle Hosea Hosch.

I know he was born in 1890, probably in Hoschton, Jackson County, GA. He married Jessie Montgomery In Walton County, Georgia on November 2, 1908. Of the three brothers, he's the only one that did not migrate out of GA. He just disappears after the 1910 census. To my knowledge, he didn't have any children.

I also plan to at least account for all the grandchildren of my great Uncle Will and hopefully go from there. As geographically close as both lines are, you would think that we would be closer but sadly it's not the case. Hopefully, although I myself have also been guilty of not communicating with my kin, we can somehow find a way to build a bridge across the 83 miles that seperate the bulk of my great grandparents descendants. And for me, from the beginings of my research efforts, this reclaiming of lost lines, reuniting with the ones that are on the verge of being lost, etc, has always been a goal that is of utmost importantance.

Until next time!