My 1^st cousins and other close relatives such as aunts, uncles, nieces and nephews are obviously members of our Young/Jung family tree. We also know that we are related to the other 125 or so branches in this book. But for many of our kin, the relationship may not be so obvious. So, for many readers the question, "Is this my family tree?" is a valid question. In the section that follows I will try to provide some answers to that question.

Is this my family tree? So far in this book we have dealt primarily with our direct ancestors. We made an exception in the Ancestor Data section to introduce you to some important or colorful cousins. But, we have not yet addressed the large list of descendants of our ancestors.

Look for a moment at the Composite Family Tree on page 59. Imagine that you are standing 300 years ago with Hans Velten Jung and his wife Maria Barbara Jung. You are at the 'top' of our known Jung/Young branch, looking forward in time toward the 21^st century. From that vantage point you can see Hans Velten and Maria Barbara's family included 8 children: Nicol, Michael, Catharine, Debold, Barbara, Ottilia, Valentin, and Simon. Of these 8 children, Valentin was our direct ancestor. Valentin married Maria Catharina Schwartz and this couple had 10 children. Of these 10 children, Adam was our direct ancestor. And, so it went for 10 generations until you finally reach my 1^st cousins and me. (The full direct Jung/Young lineage can be found on page 170.)

But, what about Hans Velten and Maria Barbara's other 7 children? It is likely that they too propagated and each of them started their own line of descendants. If each of the Hans Velten and Maria Barbara Jung children had 10 children of their own (which they probably did not) those 80 children would have been siblings and 1^st cousins. You can begin to see just how many descendants there can be from a single ancestral couple like Hans Velten and Maria Barbara Jung. Yet by tracking only direct ancestors, we only count one person per generation or a total of 10 people in a 10 generation line.

So, how many descendants did Hans Velten and Maria Barbara Jung have? We will never know, of course, but the number is large. We can estimate the maximum number of theoretically possible descendants by assuming an average number of children propagated by each descendant and assuming that there is no cross linking among family members. The table on page 343 gives these maximum numbers of descendants for a period of 10 generations and several average propagation rates. The average propagation rate for our Jung/Young family can be calculated and is somewhat over 5.7 children per descendant. This rate has been included in the table below.

What this estimate can not include is the "loss" of descendants due to cross-linkage or inter-marriage between members of the family. As we saw on pages 8 - 10 of this book, cross linking accounts for a major "loss" of ancestors. These same cross links, plus many more that occur within the extended family, have an even greater impact on the number of descendants. This is true because while the number of direct ancestors doubles with each preceding generation, the number of descendants increase by much higher multiples. As noted above, the average number of children (the

multiplication factor) for our 10 generations of Jung/Young family is somewhat larger than 5.7.

The factors that cause cross linking in our ancestral lines are the same factors that apply to their descendants. It is likely, therefore, that the percentage "loss" of descendants would be about the same as the percentage "loss" of ancestors. So, if as concluded on page 10, cross linking resulted in the loss of up to 90% of our ancestors, the actual number of descendants in the table above might be only 10% of the maximum number shown. Nevertheless, the numbers of descendants is still large.

You can see that there are certainly many cousins in the world who descend from Hans Velten and Maria Barbara Jung, most of whom do not even know their lineage. In the section that follows is a Descendant Outline for 6 of our 125 or so ancestral lines. These Descendant Outlines contain only a small fraction of the "actual" descendants -- they are only the ones that we know about. My guess is that we know about only about 0.5% to 2% of these descendants.

The following Descendant Outline section is preceded by an index for easy access. If you are in this index, the Ancestor Tree in this book is your Ancestor Tree. If you are not in the index and your ancestors lived near Rumbach, Germany or Lewisville, Ohio, there is still a good chance that this book contains at least parts of your ancestral family tree.

Return to Ancestor Data Index ….. Next (Index of Descendants) ….. Table of Contents

Time-Line

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