Descendancy research starts farther back in time and moves toward the present.
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/Descendancy_Research
Who are Descendants?
All of a couple's children, grandchildren, great grandchildren, great great grandchildren, etc. are considered their descendants.
What is Descendancy Research?
Descendancy research is the process of choosing one of your ancestral couples and identifying all of their descendants. Start with a couple of about four to five generations back on your pedigree who lived in the early to mid-nineteenth century in an area with available records. You then locate that couple and their children in available records, identify children, children's spouses, and grandchildren. Repeat for each of the children and grandchildren.
Why do Descendancy Research?
Descendancy Research will help you to identify and connect with distant cousins, locate family documents and photos, share stories, and collaborate on research projects. It is especially useful for those with full family trees, as it allows for a more detailed view of all of the members of a family tree from a specific point in the past, as opposed to conventional research, which works backwards from a specific person and doesn't provide as full of a perspective for all the members of a family. This makes it a tremendously valuable tool for finding missing relatives, finding relatives with sparse records that need more information, as well as discovering distant relations. Even trees that have been completely filled in back several generations can be expanded further with descendancy research.
How do I do Descendancy Research?
The following video and handout will help you use the resources of FamilySearch to find the descendants of one your ancestral couples.
VIDEO on Descendancy Research (c 2013)
Handout on Descendancy Research (from video)
https://www.familysearch.org/en/wiki/How_to_Find_Descendants_in_the_United_States
How to Find Descendants in the United States
The goal of descendancy research is to find the children (and spouses), grandchildren (and spouses), and so forth of an ancestral couple. Descendancy research starts farther back in time and moves toward the present.
Motives for descendancy research. Researchers sometimes do descendancy research in order to:
- contact relatives who have moved to distant lands
- show a relationship to a famous ancestor
- find genealogical evidence such as the family Bible of a common ancestor
- return a family heirloom such as an old photograph
- find heirs of an unclaimed rich estate
- locate possible compatable organ donors
- identify family members who may have an inherited tendancy toward a disease
- publish an article in a genealogical journal like the New England Historical and Genealogical Society Register
- submit an application for certification with the Board for Certification of Genealogists
- research direct-line ancestors and their children.
- locate living descendants of ancestors for DNA testing purposes.
Value of Descendancy Research
More names per generation. One advantage of descendancy research is the potential number of names you could find. Most families have more than two children per couple. If all those children marry and have more than two children, there is a potential to find more relatives by descendancy research than in the same number of generations of pedigree research. However, to be fair, pedigree researchers also usually research the immediate children of each couple on their pedigree. In theory, assuming each generation has exactly four children who live, marry once, and have exactly four children, in three generations, pedigree researchers would find 42 relatives (counting spouses and immediate children), and descendancy researchers would find 106 relatives. With larger families the difference can increase dramatically. This way of counting names does not change the number of actual people who have lived—it only changes because of who you count as a relative.
Risks of Descendancy Research
It may be harder. Some genealogists consider descendancy research more difficult than pedigree research. This is because finding children is sometimes more difficult than finding parents. There are always exactly two parents of each child, but the number of children of each set of parents can vary widely. In many cases there tends to be more documents that are likely to name the parents of a child, and fewer documents that list all the children of a set of parents. Finding children who died young and between censuses is often more difficult than finding parents.
On the other hand, some genealogists consider descendancy research easier—an opportunity to snatch the low-hanging fruit[1] by the wagon full.
Latter-day Saints
Acting in conflict with the wishes of the closest living relative can result in bad feelings.[2] Mass descendancy research and submissions by an overzealous distant cousin often deprive more closely related family members of the joy of contributing work on their nearer relatives.
Protect privacy and the feelings of others.
Please be respectful and considerate of the feelings of living relatives regarding their deceased ancestors.
Choose a Starting Family
Do you have an ancestor about whom you are curious? Have you heard intriguing stories about a great-grandparent? Possibly you are looking for a genetic connection to a great uncle who may have had the same illness you have just had diagnosed. Many reasons may spark your interest in a particular individual or family. Regardless of how you decide, the first step is to choose an individual or family to use as the starting point.
Here are a few suggestions to keep in mind as you get started:
- Begin with what you know. If you already know the names of your great-grandparents and approximately when and where they were married, it will be much easier to search for their descendants.
- Begin with individuals or families alive around 1850. People who lived in the period from the mid-1800s to the present are usually easier to find. In many countries, birth, and death records began to be created by the mid-1800s. Also, some countries began to keep census records showing the names and ages of each family member.
- Record what you find on family group records. A family group record will enable you to record information for all the children in a family, parents and grandparents. As you search for the descendants of your ancestors, family group records will help you organize your work.
Internet search engines. Search engines, such as Google or Yahoo, help you learn if someone has posted information on the Internet about your ancestors or their descendants. Search engines may help you find pedigree charts, family Websites, cemetery records, personal histories, family Bibles, and so forth.
Expert Tip: You may find many references to your ancestor in a search engine, especially if he or she has a common name. The following search strategies can help to narrow your search:- To search for an exact phrase or name, put quotation marks around your search terms. For example, search on "John K. Doe" (typing the quotation marks into the search box). Also try putting the surname first and the given name second—“Doe, John K.”
- You many also want to try the name without middle initials.
- Remember to try alternate spellings, abbreviations, nicknames, and so forth.
- Try adding a place name or date to your search terms. For example, to find all the Werths from Chicago, enter a search phrase like Werth Chicago.
- Try typing the family name, along with the word "genealogy" or "family history."
Consult Additional Sources
Five record types are especially rich in descendant information:
Census Records. Censuses show where a family lived. When you know where someone lived you can search for other records created for them in that place. Censuses also may list all living members of a family, and tell their relationship to the head of house. The best researchers use ALL the censuses available for every member of a family.
Expert Tip: The U.S. 1900 and 1910 censuses give the number of children born to a mother, and how many were still living.
Wills and probate records. Some jurisdictions have wills or probate records useful to genealogists as early as the 1600s. Wills commonly list children by name. Even if your ancestor did not leave a will, a probate record containing a list of possible heirs may still exist. Wills and probate records are generally kept on a county level, so you will need to have some idea of where your ancestors died to find a will.
County and local histories. County histories often identify families and some of their descendants.
Church records. Many churches kept christening (baptism) records showing a child and parents. If you can guess the denomination of your ancestor, look for church records.
Obituaries. By the 1870s local newspapers often published obituaries listing the surviving relatives of the deceased and sometimes their residence.
Conclusion Finding the descendants of your ancestors can be rewarding. This approach to family history research will help you find hundreds of relatives you would have missed had you focused your research only on your ancestors. It might also provide the clues and information you need to get past dead ends in your search for ancestors. Descendancy research will help you locate living relatives you didn’t know about. You can collaborate with living relatives and share the workload with others. Learning about the children, grandchildren, and even the great-grandchildren of your ancestors gives you a more complete picture of your family.
Branching Out on Your Family Tree
By George D. Durrant
I remember, as a grandfather, having a picture taken of our family. Like other grandparents, I did not want a single descendant left out. What a task it was to arrange everyone’s schedule so we could all be in the same place at the same time. But it was worth it.
I think that is how most families feel. Grandparents love their children and grandchildren. They want to spend eternity with them. So why wouldn’t our ancestors feel the same way about their posterity? I think they would.
As Latter-day Saints, we have the priesthood power to provide temple ordinances that can seal families together forever. So just as my grandparents didn’t want to leave even one of their children or grandchildren out of the family portrait, they wouldn’t want to leave even one of them out of their eternal family.
Yet as we reach back through time on our pedigree, we sometimes provide the saving ordinances for only one child of each couple on our pedigree chart—the child who is our direct ancestor. We seal that child to his or her parents, but we forget about the rest of the children in that family. We leave our ancestral families like an incomplete family portrait with many empty spaces.
Providing temple ordinances for relatives other than our direct ancestors is not a new direction. This article is simply a reminder that in addition to providing ordinances for our direct ancestors, we can also provide ordinances for the descendants of our direct ancestors. We should, however, be sensitive to the feelings of others and obtain permission from the closest living relative when submitting the names of deceased persons who were born within the last 95 years.
President Boyd K. Packer, Acting President of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles, wrote on July 14, 1994: “Members of the Church as individuals and families are responsible to identify their own direct-line ancestral families and see that temple ordinances are performed for them. They may also do family history research and temple work for their deceased relatives who are collaterally related (not their direct lines).”1
So why would anyone want to do family history for an ancestral family?
Some people feel that their family history has all been done. By choosing an ancestor on our pedigree chart and identifying the ancestor’s children and grandchildren, we will have the opportunity to experience the joy of doing family history work and providing temple ordinances for more of our own family members.
Records become scarcer as we research ancestors who lived in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. When we do research in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, we have more records available and, as a result, have more opportunity for success.
Since the families of the children and grandchildren often lived in the same area as grandparents, we can find the needed information with little extra work. This is an efficient use of research time.
Clues to ancestors are found in the records of their descendants. When you gather records of the descendants of an ancestor, you will have a better chance of finding clues of that ancestor than if you just search the records of one child or grandchild.
Meeting living cousins can be a blessing. All of you will learn more family stories and discover other family photos. You may also find out more about your common ancestors.
Attending the temple and doing vicarious work for a person who never had these temple ordinances in life is spiritually satisfying, but when we do this work for our own family members, the satisfaction is magnified. By seeking the descendants of a direct line ancestor, all of whom have a kinship relationship to us, our time spent in doing their temple work will have deeper meaning in our lives.
Perhaps you have already been approaching your family history in this broader way. If so, you already know the joy of seeing things through the eyes of your ancestors. You recognize that they would want to have their children and grandchildren with them eternally, just as we do. You may have even broadened your research to include great-grandchildren and beyond. The more of the members of an ancestral family for whom you are able to do temple work, the greater the joy and rejoicing your ancestors will be able to have in their posterity.
Helps for Home Evening
Create a game by hanging fruit at different heights, including some that are too high to reach. Have family members try to pick the fruit. At what height is the fruit easiest to pick? Read “Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit,” and discuss how family history research can produce great success when we identify family members who lived within the last 150 years.
Picking the Low-Hanging Fruit
By Sam Lower
My great-great-grandparents were born about 1800. Climbing that far up my family tree was fairly easy for me. Climbing higher up the family tree will be harder. So I thought about branching out. Have you? The fruit that is easiest to pick is in the lower branches of our family tree, among the descendants of our great-great-grandparents. Our success rate in the lower branches will be greater than in the higher branches.
For example, if we have an average of five children per family and come down five generations, we can expect to find 12,496 people.
Printing a descendancy chart will show you where to look for family members on the lower, more accessible branches of your family tree. By picking the low-hanging fruit, we will be able to identify more family members, provide temple ordinances for them, and seal their families together for eternity.
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