About generations

Stages in the American Dream
400 years or so

Last year, when we did the Fifteen Generations post, the notion was to estimate how many generations are there now back to Thomas for people who are currently alive. Of course, we may have three  generations of a family to consider. So, one range would go from twelve to fifteen, with the exceptional occurrences of four generations going eleven to fifteen.

One of our goals is to identify and document the first two to five generations from Thomas and Margaret where generation two would be the grandchildren. In his first book, Dr. Frank mostly covered some of these persons and Samuel's line down to the generation of Dr. Frank's father.

The Mayflower Society has books out to five generations. The data is not complete as I have verified. However, they are now focusing on two generations at WikiTree: Project:Mayflower. That was nice to see actually, as this society has been working for a century. Early on,  I noted that Dr. Frank was not complete with his view of two generations, a 100 years ago: The kids.

Related article on Quora: How many years are there in a generation? The NEHGS has used some of the data from the 5th generation database to look at the length of a generation. As well, we can see the average length per generation and a few other things.

From Vita Brevis: How long is a generation?

So, we are not late. And, we can use WikiTree to build this database to be the basis for further research and some interesting studies. The intent is to publish the first three generations within the next year or so.

This falls within the category of the numbers games that have become quite addictive.

Note: Article from the International Society of Genetic Genealogy: Generation length.

Remarks: Modified: 07/28/2020

10/24/2019 -- Notes in Vita Brevis article briefly touch on some technical (statistical) issues, such as incomplete data (actually, the reality of this type of work). I would add another. It's a conflation of information about more than one generation and is more of a cultural view than that of nature. It would be interesting to separate out the three groups: elderly, mature, and child. For the last, I would use Richard More (uncle). The first, Brewster comes to mind. The computer (and its ability to hoard (yes) will allow all sorts of studies - to wit, data science). Then, the idea would be to use the birth dates, when known, of the individuals. Some of these would be, it is noted, before 1620.

07/28/2020 -- Have done several posts related to generations: 5th generation, 6th generation, 7th generation, 1900 back, American 100s, First five, and About generations.