Tag: Saturday Night Genealogy Fun

Ancestral Birthplace Chart A Little Saturday Night Fun

Kris Hocker on 26 Mar 2016

Cropped 5 gen chart

So, Randy Seaver’s Saturday Night fun challenge was to create a color-coded ancestral birthplace chart. This chart has been popping up all over the genea-blogosphere in recent days and it seemed like a fun idea. I decided to play along, too.

5 generation birth location chart

The majority of my ancestors were born and lived in Pennsylvania from their arrival in the 18th century. So my five generation ancestral chart is not very colorful. With the exception of my birthplace and of a couple of latecomers from Scotland and Germany, it’s all the same color.

Extending the chart to six generations makes it a little more colorful, but not that much.

6 gen birthplace chart

Elizabeth (Buchanan) Bonnington’s birthplace is either Scotland or Ireland. Benjamin Houdeshell was born in West Virginia when it was still part of Virginia. And Reverend Frederic Waage was born in what is now part of Denmark, but was part of Germany at the time of his birth.

If I extended the chart to the immigrants for all those green boxes, the chart would still be nearly monochromatic. Most of those ancestors were born in Germany (or German-controlled locations such as Alsace-Lorraine), though some had ancestors born in Switzerland.

My Smith/Bonnington, Mulholland and Jones ancestors would add color as I would be able to add more Scotland and Ireland, as well as England and Wales to the palette. But here in the U.S. my ancestors were almost universally born in Pennsylvania, except for one line with connections to New Jersey and Rhode Island.

Ahnentafel Roulette—#24 Karl Phillipp Greulich

Kris Hocker on 26 Jul 2014

Ahnentafel Roulette

Randy Seaver at Geneamusings posts a genealogy fun challenge every Saturday. Today is ahnentafel roulette. The rules are:

1) What year was one of your great-grandfathers born?  Divide this number by 80 and round the number off to a whole number. This is your “roulette number.”
2) Use your pedigree charts or your family tree genealogy software program to find the person with that number in your ancestral name list (some people call it an “ahnentafel” – your software will create this – use the “Ahnentafel List” option, or similar). Who is that person, and what are his/her vital information?
3) Tell us three facts about that person in your ancestral name list with the “roulette number.”
4) Write about it in a blog post on your own blog, in a Facebook status or a Google Stream post, or as a comment on this blog post.
5) NOTE:  If you do not have a person’s name for your “roulette number” then “spin” the wheel again – pick a great-grandmother, a grandfather, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, yourself, or even your children!  Or pick an ancestor!

So, I chose a great grandfather (in fact, I tried this will all four of them!), got his birth year (1880), and divided by 80. The number, rounded to a whole number, was 24 (all four times!).

Number 24 in my ahnentafel report was Karl “Charles” Phillipp Greulich.

Three facts about my great great grandfather are:

  1. Charles was born 13 September 1838 in Haag, Mosbach, Baden-Wurtemberg (now Germany) to Georg Phillipp Greulich and Anna Margaretha Wurzel.
  2. In 1755, when Charles was 17, his father died and his property went to his eldest (adopted) son Phillipp Peter, son of Georg’s first wife, Maria Katharina Lindenbach. Charles, his sister Eva, and their half-brother Georg Phillipp Jakob emigrated to the United States, arriving in New York on 28 January 1856.
  3. Charles was a shoemaker in East Greenville, Montgomery County, Pennsylvania, who had fourteen children with his two wives—one with his first wife Susanna Krauss Wolf, and thirteen with his second wife, Susanna’s sister, Caroline Krauss Wolf. They were daughters of Joel and Elizabeth (Krauss) Wolf.

featured image photo credit: Håkan Dahlström via photopin cc