Just for fun, I decided to look at the men listed on the Web site referenced yesterday to see which ones were part of our family line (http://www.mcusa-archives.org/Features/northkill.html)
Here is what I found:
Jacob Beiler
Christian Burki
Melchior Detweiler
Hans Gnagi
Christian Hershberger
Bishop Jacob Hertzler
Jacob Hochstetler
Isaac Kauffman
Jacob Mast
Christian Miller
Michael Troyer
Christian Yoder, Sr.,
ChristianYoder, Jr.,
Yost Yoder
What I can’t remember is: when I put the family tree together, did I pursue all the grandmothers’ lines as far as I could. I think I did, because it just about drove me crazy figuring out where I was in the tree as I transferred information. This was rendered more difficult because among the Amish, multiple generations have the same name, without any indication of Sr., Jr., etc. And, of course, the given names seem to be chosen out of a somewhat limited pool.
The only part that made life easier is when a couple I had already traced appeared again. Then their ancestors would automatically be added in again. This is called pedigree collapse, I just learned today. When you consider that the number of sets of grandparents doubles with each generation, thinking of searching for all of them begins to boggle the mind. Here’s how it goes:
2 - 4 - 8 - 16 - 32 - 64 - 128 - 256 - 512 - 1024 - 2048 - 4096
Then one doesn’t mind that the same couple appears more than once in the tree! However, we don’t want that pedigree collapse to go too far, do we? The book Descendants of Jacob Hochstetler deals with this, too. I think the author noted 700 families where someone had married a relative. (But then, if you go back far enough, we’re all relatives!)
This first article below is a somewhat whimsical treatment of this subject. The second has some interesting examples of pedigree collapse.
http://mb-soft.com/public/genealog.html
http://www.generations.on.ca/genealogy/pedigree.htm
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