How Many Cousins?

How Many Cousins?

Some of us are under the impression that all of our dead have had their ordinance work completed.  When I was preparing for a presentation in Argentina on family history and temple work I wanted to impress upon my listeners how many relatives we could have when we consider the descendants of all our direct ancestors.  By this I mean that for every direct-line ancestral family I can perform ordinances not only for that immediate family, but also for all of their descendants!  I sat down and prepared a little spreadsheet program to calculate how many people that might involve going back a given number of generations.  The results are eye opening.

Say you go back 10 generations.  Assuming an average of 25 years per generation that puts you at about the year 1766.  It is difficult to find records in the United States for persons living much earlier than that.  So going back 10 generations, if I count myself as the first generation, and assuming no intermarriage between cousins and no brothers of one family marrying sisters of another, I will have 512 direct ancestral families living in about the year 1766.  If I further assume that each of those 512 ancestral families had three children who lived to adulthood and married, and I think that is a conservative estimate, and assuming each of those three children married and had three children of their own, and assuming that reproductive rate continues uninterrupted down to the present day, the number of people to whom I have a specific ancestral relationship is 60.4 million.

Now I must be quick to point out that of that 60.4 million roughly 59 million would have been born within the last 110 years, which makes them ineligible for vicarious temple ordinances without the consent of the closest living relative, which in most of these cases will be hard to get.  So that leaves me with a mere 1.4 million persons whose vicarious temple work I am responsible for, and with every decade that goes by another half-million or so become eligible.  I think I can stay busy for the next couple of years searching for the identities of a million and a half distant cousins.