Saturday, January 15, 2011

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun: Ancestral Name List Roulette

Randy Seaver at Genea-Musings has come up with this fun activity for a cold, drizzly evening:

1) How old is one of your grandfathers now, or how old would he be if he had lived? Divide this number by 4 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"). Who is that person?

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 note or comment, or as a comment on this blog post.

5) If you do not have a person's name for your "roulette number" then spin the wheel again - pick a grandmother, or yourself, a parent, a favorite aunt or cousin, or even your children!


My grandfather Paul Robert Pape would be 114 if he was still alive.  Divided by 4, that rounds up to 29.  Number 29 in my ahnentafel is a great-great-grandmother, Margaret Melzina "Maggie" Carroll.  I wrote a post a while back with all the facts I know about her.  Two bits of trivia:  my grandmother Sara Wolfe shares her middle name, and Maggie is supposedly descended from the famous Carrolls of Maryland, although I don't have any proof of that yet.

If I had used my other grandfather, Charles Peter Guokas, he would have been 107, which when divided by 4 rounds up to 27.  Unfortunately on my ahnentafel, that would be his maternal grandmother, my unknown great-great-grandmother in Lithuania.

© Amanda Pape - 2011

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