Did you notice the CC7 table started one year ago today?

Question

The first CC7 weekly report was on June 14, 2022--one year ago today. I am a little surprised not to have seen another post about this. Did I just miss it?

I'm not one of those who has been able to increase their CC7 astronomically, but it did increase by slightly over 1,000.

How much did your CC7 increase in one year?

Answer 1

I don't have big CC7 numbers, but I can honestly say that I doubled my count over the last year.  My CC7 went from 288 to 577.

Thanks for asking, Nelda.

Answer 2

I went from 2402 to 3196—not too shabby. I never actively tried increasing that number until last week when I increased it by 182; otherwise it's been a very gradual climb.

As I look through my CC7 history I notice I actually went down slightly in May from 3012 to 2992; I've since made up the difference, but I wonder what happened there?

Answer 3

My CC7 score increased by 350 (from 624 to 974).

• Degree 1: 0
• Degree 2: +1
• Degree 3: +3
• Degree 4: +32
• Degree 5: +54
• Degree 6: +117
• Degree 7: +143

Answer 4

I've increased from 2578 to 3072, a change of 494. Much of this is due to recent work I've done on my degree 3 and 4 connections, so a lot of potential for more exponential growth in the future.

Answer 5

A whole year! Good grief! Mine went from 1907 to 3021.  Most of mine were from degree #5.

Answer 6

I went up from 869 to 1,422. The 2,000 badge is still a long way off

I don't spend a lot of work expanding that number, but I do try to fill out a family when I find someone in the 6th circle or lower that hasn't been fully researched.

Edit: I should add that the CC7 quest has been a great incitament to clean up and put into shape a lot of profiles of close family members from late 19th century, which I've kept as private in my own database from my early days of genealogy, when I wasn't as strict about sourcing as I've become later. They have now been put on WikiTree.

Answer 7

Thanks for alerting us to this anniversary. I'd not checked on my beginning numbers, but have been adding a lot of profiles and see that I more than doubled my score from 1549 to 3291, and I keep finding more families lacking profiles for their children.  Chasing numbers is an incentive for some of us 

Answer 8

I guess I’m a control since I’ve never looked at it before. But people might like a control!

With no effort on my part, mine went from 992 to 1,019, an increase of 27. 5 of that increase happened in the last week!

Answer 9

Hi, Its amazing how many connections there are when you start looking, Mine went from 4,330 to 9,568, cant believe it.

All the best

Answer 10

Mine was 282 a year ago, and is now 936.

Answer 11

My CC7 count went from 2 158 to 5 048 in a year - I worked on it systematically from the beginning of July and got the 5000 badge in the beginning of April. Since then it has basically been standing still - there are hardly any other WikiTreers within my CC7 range.

Answer 12

Thanks Nelda for the reminder. One year is indeed time to look at the effects of this CC7 affair. For the record, let me recall two things.

Introduction of the "circles" concept is almost three years old now, the 100 Circles page was created in November 2020.

As a "founding father" (with a handful of friends including Eva) of this project, I've expressed concerns to the way the concept was (ab)used by its reduction, sort of, to this single CC7 indicator.

After this disclaimer, what lessons can we bring home from this first year of CC7 frenzy?

CC7 has been way more popular than the original, maybe too abstract idea, of "expanding circles". Somehow it made the idea of circles more widely understood, and pushed people to explore new directions of connection, they were previously ignoring. That's a good point.

However, the (quite arbitrary but result of a reasonable consensus) limit of 7 circles has certainly the counter-productive effect to have many people stop searching beyond the 7th circle.

As the examples given in the "Beyond CC7" page show, very different global connection structures can happen for profiles with similar CC7 figures. The Connections Count help page more or less explicitly indicates that growing locally your CC7 is making the tree globally better connected. This is not exactly true, in particular if you work (as I do) on branches a bit far-off the American WikiTree bulk. If my branches are not too badly connected to the bulk, it's mostly through critical paths typically around my 10th circle. If I had, since I joined WikiTree, focused only on my CC7, maybe I would not be connected at all today, or barely.

Last but not least, the CC7 of any active (hence living) WikiTreer does not extend in the past more than about 250 years. For the typical boomer, that means CC7 does not extend much before 1700. For the youngest of WikiTreers, it's more like not before 1750. So, focusing on CC7 makes you forget about pre-1700 ancestors. This can be seen as bad news by "deep ancestors maniacs". I take it as good news, for various reasons on which I won't elaborate here (I've been too long already).