u/PuzzleheadedBus1404

I created this graph using the birth, baptism, death, burial, census and other records I have collected while researching my direct ancestors.

The count increases by one whenever an ancestor is born and decreases by one whenever an ancestor dies. Rather than plotting a value for every day, I recorded each point at which the total changed and used a COUNT formula in Google Sheets to calculate how many ancestors were alive at that moment.

The spreadsheet was originally created to track the maximum and average ages of my living ancestors over time. Once the lifespan data was assembled, I realised I could also use it to chart the total number who were alive at each point.

At the beginning of 1850, 140 of my currently identified direct ancestors were alive:

• 11 third-great-grandparents
• 60 fourth-great-grandparents
• 59 fifth-great-grandparents
• 10 sixth-great-grandparents

I used exact birth and death dates wherever I could establish them. Where an exact date was unavailable, I used conservative record-based boundaries: the latest supported birth date and the earliest supported death date.

For example, a baptism provides a date by which the person must already have been born. A census or another record showing that someone was alive establishes that their death occurred after that record. I used these boundaries so the graph would never count someone as alive during a period when they may already have died.

The sharp drop in 1851 represents seven ancestors whose death or burial records I have not yet found. Their final known records are entries in the 1851 census, so the graph stops counting them after that evidence ends. It does not mean that all seven are known to have died at the same time in 1851.

The family-tree data is mostly complete for the period shown, although further records may allow some dates to be refined.

Has anyone else used spreadsheets or other tools to create visualizations from their genealogical research?