Saturday Night Genealogy Fun! Meet my 2nd Great-grandparents

Your mission, should you decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:

1)  We each have 16 great-great grandparents.  How did their birth and death years vary?  How long were their lifespans?  

2)  For this week, please list your 16 great-great grandparents, their birth year, their death year, and their lifespan in years.  You can do it in plain text, in a table or spreadsheet, or in a graph of some sort.

3)  Share your information about your 16 great-great grandparents with us in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this blog post, or on Facebook or Google+.  If you write your own blog post, please leave a link as a comment to this post.

I only know 14 of my 16 second great-grandparents and I don’t have all of their vital dates.  All of mine are from Germany, Ireland, and Norway.  I will say that the church records from both Germany and Norway are excellent.  Unfortunately the Irish records are both sporadic and illegible.  Here is what I do have on my second great-grandparents. I have sorted them by country.

IRELAND

Patrick Leahy born about 1805

Ellen Mc Carthy born about 1807

Patrick Connery born about 1794

Ellen Drake born about 1800

John Hennessy born about 1784 – died 10 Oct 1833

Mary O’Donnell born about 1790 – died about 1833

NORWAY

Daniel Kristensen born 1817 – died after 1865*

Karen Dorthea Christiansen born 1833 – died 1928?

Martin Hansen born 1829 – died after 1865*

Johanne Sofie Johannesdatter born Oct 1829 – died 1901

GERMANY

Georg Burbach born 1825 – died 1897

Catherina Caspari born 1825 – died 1913

Phillip Schmitz born 1834 – died 1906

Elisabeth Kronenberger born 1832 – died 1876

*After 1865 because they are noted in the 1865 Norway census

This exercise has shown me where I need to do more research for the missing death information.  It is also interesting to note that my Granddaughter (born 1999) was born in the same town in Germany as her 4^th great-grandmother Elizabeth Kronenberger.

Saturday Night Genealogy Fun! Family Tree Statistics

Here is your assignment if you choose to play along (cue the Mission Impossible music, please!):

1) My friend and colleague Linda Stufflebean posted JUST FOR FUN – 4 X 6 = 24 FAMILY TREE QUESTIONS on her blog this week, and I thought we could answer half of the questions this week and half next week.

2)  Here are the first three questions:

*  What four places did my ancestors live that are geographically the farthest from where I live today?
*  What are the four most unusual given names in my family tree?

*  What are the four most common given names in my family tree?

3)  Answer each of the questions based on your own ancestors, not the collateral lines.

4)  Share your answers with us in a blog post of your own, in a comment to this post, in a Facebook post or a Google+ post.  Please provide a link to your response if you can.

The four places that my ancestors lived that are geographically the farthest from where I live today are:

Oberselters, Hessen-Nassau, Prussia - My Burbachs who immigrated in 1856.

Oslo, Akershus, Norway - My Hansens who immigrated in 1894

Ballylanders and Kilfinane, County Limerick, Ireland - my Flemings and Connerys who immigrated in the 1880s and 1890s.

Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin where my Schmidts were established in the 1840s.

The four most unusual given names in my family tree are:

Dafin Hansen(b 1801) married Mari Olsdatter in Nittedal, Akershus, Norway.

Hubertus Burbach (b 1798) married Catherine Schaaf in Oberselters, Hessen-Nassau,Prussia.

Dorette Christensdatter (b 1857) married Johannes Adolf Waldemar Hansen in Oslo, Akershus, Norway

Adolph Halfdan Hansen (b 1880) married Henrietta Burbach in Milwaukee, Milwaukee, Wisconsin.

The four most common given names in my family tree are:  

Mary (3), Patrick (3), Adam (2) and Anna (2)

For this project I created a gedcom file of only my direct line ancestors in Family Tree Maker and imported it into Legacy Family Tree and used the Statietics Report.  Had I used my full file including the collateral lines and all siblings the results would have been much different.