How did I fare with my family tree research since starting the blog?

So the very first post on this blog wisely talked about family tree being the number one resource and prerequisite for a genetic genealogists work. We have stressed out how most of our DNA matches are probably 8th followed by 7th cousins. And we need a deep tree for that.

Well, the sad truth is I was more distracted elsewhere (e.g. 23andMe sharing series) and haven't done the progress I hoped for, when writing the initial blog post.

Here comes the comparison table:

gen#	rel	match	#anc/gen	#idd me	#idd mgm	#idd mgf	#idd pgm	#idd pgf
2	gp	1C	4	4	4	4	4	4
3	Ggp	2C	8	8	8	8	7	7
4	GGgp	3C	16	16	15	16	14 (+3)	14
5	3Ggp	4C	32	30	30	32 (+1)	22 (+4)	26 (+1)
6	4Ggp	5C	64	59 (+3)	49 (+1)	38 (+4)	27	32 (+7)
7	5Ggp	6C	128	110 (+6)	21 (+5)	31 (+6)	18 (+3)	4 (+1)
8	6Ggp	7C	256	146 (+11)	6 (+2)	46 (+19)	11 (+4)	0
9	7Ggp	8C	512	74 (+15)	4 (+3)	43 (+15)	10 (+4)	0
10	8Ggp	9C	1024	63 (+25)	1 (+1)	8 (+2)	6 (+4)	0

Thankfully, we have made some progress since the first post, signified by the little + numbers in brackets.

Let's first look at the number of my identified ancestors in the light purple (#idd me) column. Our final goal is to have all of the ancestors identified - for this light purple number to be equal to the darker purple number. Up till 7th generation, we're faring well, but then, the numbers fall of extremely rapidly.

We said most of our matches are likely 8th cousins (blue column) and we have still only identified 74 out of 512 possible ancestors. This clearly shows working with DNA matches is going to be frustrating! We need to improve our tree tree further!

Also, I was only talking about my own numbers, but in the 4 white columns, I have included my grandparent's point of view. This is because I am mostly working with DNA matches from the point of view of my grandparents. Here we can see the 8C level is abysmal. We just can't expect finding any common relatives at all, with the trees being so sparse.

Clearly, while I like the DNA work, it is time to sit by the parish records again, and do some serious heavy lifting. I need to call the target for my paternal grandfather (pgf in the table) again, and focus on it this time.

Let me try to shoot for two goals in 2017:

1. Identify half of my paternal grandfather's 7th generation. I.e. 64 ancestors. This is an ambitious plan, as I have not reached 64 ancestors on this level for none of my other grandparents. But it is important to aim high.
2. Identify 40% of my own overall ancestors up to the 10th generation. This means identifying 818 ancestors of mine (out of 2046). I currently [think I] know 512 of them. This means identifying 306 new ancestors of mine in the new year 2017.

All in all, I will try to keep active with the blog but focus on tree building efforts.