An Evening at the Family History Center

I worked at the Family History Center last night. It was a good night even though I got there about half an hour late.

Temple Ready
There was a sister there from my ward working on preparing names for temple work by using the Temple Ready program. She has been going to the Family History Center all week trying to get names ready for a youth baptism trip to the temple. It was good to see her there.

Genealogy Merit Badge
While I was talking with her and trying to help in any way that I could, a set of twelve-year-old twins from my ward came in with their dad to work on the genealogy merit badge. I presented information about that merit badge at their Scout meeting about a month ago, and they came to the Family History Center as a follow up. We had a good discussion and reviewed the merit badge requirements that they had complete and identified the things that they still needed to do. I suspect that we will have a follow up on a Sunday during one of the next few weeks. Their dad dropped them off and about half an hour later their mom picked them up. I was good to see all of them at the Family History Center.

Who's On The Direct Line?
After they left, I ended the evening by helping another patron gain an understanding of how to keep track of her genealogy. This good sister has a bunch of genealogy information in typed format.

She is going through that information and organizing it into family group sheets and pedigree charts and appeared to be struggling with how to keep track of which people are in her direct line and which ones are on the branches. She has been marking the ones that are on the direct line with a blue crayon and then she makes a few notes listing which grandmother or grandfather each person is in relationship to herself. (For example, this is my father's mother's father's father -- or this is my father's grandfather's father.)

I saw what she was doing and thought that I might be able to give her a bit of help if I could explain the Ahnentafel numbering system to her, so I made the attempt.

I had her look at the numbers on one of her pedigree charts. It starts with "1" for the first person, has "2" & "3" for the parents (or 2nd generation), "4", "5", "6" & "7" for the grandparents (or 3rd generation), and "8" through "15" for the 4th generation. I explained that if the chart continued, the numbers would simply continue to increase for each successive generation. (For example, "16" through "31" for the 5th, "32" through "63" for the 6th, and so on.) Now, if she puts herself in position "1", all of her direct ancestors have a unique number that can be determined by their respective positions in that chart. That number will always be the same for a given ancestor. By figuring out which number each ancestor has and then always using that number whenever referencing that person on any other chart or form, you can keep track of who is in the direct line and who is not.

I then used PAF to enter a few of her names for her and then showed her the Ahnentafel printout (in preview mode only). She was pleased to see the numbers were automatically created by the software.

I hesitated for a moment before I decided to show her the binary trick. As can be seen with a little observation, a pedigree chart is a binary tree -- each node in the tree has two branches. By assigning a "1" to the first person in the pedigree, a "1" to each mother and a "0" to each father, you can write out the binary number for anyone in the pedigree chart.

Taking the first example above (my father's mother's father's father), we have 1 for "my", "0" for "father's", "1" for "mother's", "0" for "father's" and "0" for father -- or 10100 in binary. Converting this to decimal gives "40" which is the Ahnentafel number.

Naturally, you can take the "40" decimal and convert it to binary and then "read" the 10100 as "my father's mother's father's father."

The patron understood this. She took some notes. She looked like and said that she was pleased. It was good to see her in the Family History Center.