It would be neat to count the total number of descendants someone has

Question

I think a neat tool that could be added to Wikitree is a way to count the total number of descendants a person has.  I got the idea after reading the bio of a FindAGrave contributor that mentions an ancestor of mine that says he supposedly has 39,000 direct descendants.

Also, the theories about all people of European descent being descended from notable figures such as William the Conqueror or his ancestor Charlemagne.  I wonder if Wikitree's set up has the capability to test those theories...

What do you guys think?  Would being able to count descendants be interesting or is it just me?

Edit: I found what I was looking for!  Wikitree+ has a function that does exactly this!

The previously mentioned ancestor who supposedly has 39,000 descendants currently shows as having 1,743 descendants on Wikitree

Comments

So you only have another 37257 profiles to add to get him up to date 

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Precisely!

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...but by the time you have added those 37,257 profiles there are sure to be many more descendants.  I guess you've got job security here now.

Answer 1

A fascinating subject.  I would be very interested to find out what the average number of living descendants for people born at various stages in the 19th century was.

Allowing 25 years per generation and taking the census year of 1851 as the mid point gives about 8.7 generations for someone born in 1801, 7.7 for someone born in 1826, 6.7 generations for someone born in 1851 and so on.  This neatly gives one generation coinciding with the end of the Victorian era (1901) which is also technically the start of the 20th century.

The extreme statistics would also be interesting - for example, who has the greatest number of descendants (dead or alive)?

Comments

I was actually wondering the same thing. How does one access this function?