In genealogy, one encounters many ways of displaying data, most of which are intended to show one's ascendence–of which pedigree is a particular case– or descendence. Some show a compromise ('hourglass' chart), the ascendence and descendence of a selected individual. The genealogy toolkit gramps provides these and other charts and reports. A chart (or even report) I wish it provided, but have not seen among the standard reports either in gramps or on genealogy services, is what I'd call a close cousins chart: for a given individual, their first cousins and decendents of their first cousins, most likely showing also the parents and grandparents (but no higher ascendents) by whom they are related.
Reading in social history, anthropology and sociology has led me to consider other aspects of family history data. For instance, which ancestors, at which dates and places, could sign their official documents? Which, if any, wrote wills, marriage contracts, or both? How many children did families have, and how many survived to adulthood? More simply, and this is the topic of this page, what were the ages of parents? Were ages of parents close, or was there a great age difference? Were they parents young or did they wait to have children?
The ages are fairly simple to calculate if dates of birth are known for children and their parents. In some cases, dates are only approximate. As a first version, I'll fix a single value for approximate dates; perhaps a more sophisticated chart could show a band of uncertainty (a gray area). Cases which don't have at least approximate birth dates for both parents (and child, of course) will be excluded, because the parents relative ages are the whole point of this chart.
A second decision concerns the choice of child. In the first version, the child will be the chosen descendent (SOSA=0) and ancestors. A second version could take the first child of the target's parents, and the first child of each couple of grandparents, and so on. A third version would take the last child of each family instead of the first. Another chart might show a combination of these last two, or stacks of all children, but the spacing might well become problematic, as would the treatment of parents with issue in other couples.
A simple indexing method for ascendents is this:
I've tabulated some ages for a part of my family tree. However, I'm missing some branches.
Index | Father | Mother |
---|---|---|
12 | 26 | 24 |
24 | 25 | 22 |
26 | 34 | 33 |
48 | 25 | 26 |
52 | 47 | 41 |
54 | 23 | 22 |
96 | 26 | 19 |
102 | 35 | 29 |
104 | 34 | 34 |
106 | 26 | 37 |
108 | 34 | 33 |
110 | 21 | 19 |