The census
Everyone this tree knows about, counted. It is one enormous connected web: 14,106 of the 14,108 people link to each other through parenthood or marriage — only two individuals float free.
Births by decade, 1440s–1990s
The tree’s “population curve.” It swells through the 1500s as English parish registers begin, peaks in the 1590s–1630s, then narrows toward the present as thousands of ancestral lines funnel into a handful of living descendants.
How many were alive when…
People in this tree living during each event (death year estimated for the ~2,900 people missing one).
A 17th-century family
This tree’s center of gravity is startlingly early.
- Alive for the Salem witch trials (1692)3,905
- Alive during WWII (1939–45)228
- More people knew the 1600s than the 1900s17×
Four streams
Jacob’s four grandparents carry four almost entirely separate histories. Each stream below is one grandparent’s full ancestry — its size, its signature surnames, and where it comes from.
Pittsburgh steel-era stock reaching back through Rhode Island Quakers to four Mayflower passengers — and, on the Tytherleigh line, an unbroken chain of Dorset villagers to 1540.
Origins: England · Scotland · colonial New England
Old-line Nuevomexicano families descending from the 1598 Oñate colonists of New Mexico — plus a Zuni ancestor, a Greek soldier from Crete, and a Mexican-born great-grandfather, Rodolfo Cruz.
Origins: New Mexico · New Spain · Spain · Greece
Frontier families — Dutch New Netherland Westfalls, Virginia Byrds, German Palatines, and Swiss Meiers — who pushed west across two centuries and settled in Trinity and Humboldt County, California.
Origins: England · Germany · Netherlands · Scotland
Hupa people of the Hoopa Valley — ancestors like Old Neko Jackson, born there in 1817, decades before California statehood — intermarried with a Safford line that carries Gov. William Bradford and presidential Adams blood.
Origins: Hoopa Valley (Hupa) · England · New England
Where each generation was born
Every ancestor “slot” in Jacob’s pedigree, generation by generation, colored by birthplace. Read left to right: the family is American for four generations, then dissolves into colonial America and New Spain, and by the 1500s into England, Spain, and the Continent.
Recorded birthplaces, whole tree
Countries as written in the records (colonial-era entries kept as their own category).
Crossing the Atlantic
People born in Europe who died in the Americas.
- 1500s249
- 1600s840
- 1700s118
- 1800s27
Deep time
Jacob’s pedigree names 2,876 distinct direct ancestors across 15 generations — back to people born under Henry VI of England and the Catholic Monarchs of Spain.
The paper trail, generation by generation
Each bar is one generation of Jacob’s pedigree: how many of its theoretical ancestor slots the tree actually fills. The trail is complete to generation 3, then thins — by generation 15 the tree still names 861 people of a possible 32,768.
The deepest line: sixteen links to 1540
Father to son to daughter, unbroken from Tudor Hampshire to Orange County — including five consecutive generations of men named Robert Tyderleigh.
Oldest-born ancestors
The pedigree’s edge, as recorded.
- Daniel De Watson · Aberdeenshire, Scotlandb. 1445
- Mathilda Henderson · Fife, Scotlandb. 1448
- John Chester Spalding · Suffolk, Englandb. 1450
- Patrick M’Kie · Kirkcudbrightshire, Scotlandb. 1460
- Robert Reeves · Toulouse, Franceb. 1465
- Joan Sewell · Dorset, Englandb. 1469
One ancestor, 248 ways
Pedigree collapse, spectacularly.
Colonial New Mexico began with a few dozen families who intermarried for three centuries. The result: Pedro Robledo and Catalina López de Avalos appear in Jacob’s pedigree by 248 separate paths — as do Bartolomé Romero and María de Adeva. In all, 272 ancestors show up more than once. The family tree is really a family web.
Twelve lives across six centuries
Selected direct ancestors placed on one timeline, colored by stream. Hairlines mark the moments their worlds turned.
Long lives
9,596 people have a death year, which makes lifespan arithmetic possible on a grand scale. (Ages above ~105 in colonial records are treated with a raised eyebrow — see Method.)
Average adult lifespan by century of birth
Among people who survived to 18, with plausible dates (≤110 years). Remarkably flat for four hundred years — if you made it out of childhood, your threescore was fairly safe in any century.
Surviving childhood
Share of recorded lives ending before age 5, by century of birth. Deaths of infants were under-recorded in early centuries, so the true figures were worse.
The oldest, as recorded
Full-date records only. The colonial entries at the top are almost certainly merged father-and-son records — the best-documented is Louisa Helen Kane of Hoopa, who lived 105 years across three centuries’ worth of change.
- Jabez Brockett · New Haven, Conn.113 ⚠
- Henry Palmer · Suffolk, England107 ⚠
- Anna Gorton · Rhode Island105 ⚠
- Louisa Helen Kane · Hoopa, Calif. (1886–1991)105
- Henry Byrd · Virginia → Kentucky104 ⚠
- Tomas Encarnacion Garcia · New Mexico (1803–1905)102
Born in winter
Among 4,868 people with exact birth dates, January–March births outnumber June–August by 28% — the classic rhythm of agricultural societies: spring weddings, harvest conceptions, winter babies.
Hearts & households
4,645 recorded marriages, 8,351 parent-child links, and the arithmetic of family life across five centuries.
Age at marriage by century
Grooms consistently married about four to six years older than brides, and both ages drifted upward over time. (First and later marriages combined.)
Children per family
Average number of recorded children, by the century the family began. The 1700s frontier generation peaks at more than seven children per family.
Longest marriage
Tomas Encarnacion Garcia & Maria Rita Gonsalez of New Mexico, married 1827 — together until his death in 1905, aged ~102 and ~104. (A Tudor couple is recorded at 84 years, but their dates don’t survive scrutiny.)
Most marriages
Hans Meier (1588–1637) of Switzerland is recorded with nine marriages. In all, 1,616 people in the tree married more than once — remarriage after widowhood was simply how life continued.
Largest believable family
Four families tie at nineteen recorded children, including Reichart Jacob Hoffmann & Appolonia Flinspach (m. 1661). One Swiss record claims 35 — see Curiosities for why.
Widest age gap
Thomas Gorton (b. 1526) married Anne Johnson (b. 1566) in 1591 — he was about 65, she about 25. Every one of the ten widest recorded gaps is an older groom.
Sets of twins
At least two direct ancestors were twins themselves: Mary Tytherleigh (b. 1769, Somerset) and Pedro Antonio García de Noriega (b. 1755, New Mexico) — one from each side of the ocean.
Same-birthday couples
Couples who shared a birthday — including Jacob’s great-great-grandparents Pliny Earl Jackson (Apr 18, 1899) and Shirley Octavia Norton (Apr 18, 1901) of Hoopa, born two years apart to the day.
Notable lines
Every person below is a direct ancestor in this tree, with the full line of descent one click away. Deep genealogy is internet genealogy — treat each as “as recorded,” a story the records tell rather than a certified fact.
Elsewhere in the tree
Notable figures who appear as relatives — uncles, cousins, in-laws — but not in the direct line.
Curiosities
The small print of 14,108 lives.
The September 3rd club
Eighteen people in this tree share Jacob’s exact birthday, September 3 — the earliest of them, John Carpenter, born in 1495.
Full-circle exits
Forty-nine people died on their own birthday, among them James Bradford (1689–1762), great-grandson of the Mayflower governor.
Holiday babies
19 born on Christmas, 17 on Valentine’s Day, 12 on the Fourth of July, 10 on Halloween — and not one on leap day. (51 “January 1” birthdays are mostly clerks writing an unknown date as New Year’s.)
A dynasty of Roberts
Five consecutive generations of the Dorset line were men named Robert Tyderleigh (born 1566, 1588, 1624, 1664, 1685) — a century and a half of one name in one village.
One in sixteen is a John
883 Johns, 675 Marys, 641 Elizabeths. Add Juan (156) and María (111+) and the pattern crosses the ocean. Most-duplicated full name: “Mary Smith,” thirteen of them.
Hall of nicknames
“Big Boy” McCovey · Washington “Wash” Jackson · Mariana “Azteca” Sanchez Tobar · “Klein” Anna Duttweiler · Nikolaus “Hans Nickel” Speck · Sir Thomas “The Older” Hay.
Titles on the rolls
95 Sirs, 41 Ladies, 83 Captains and Capitánes, 38 Reverends, 9 Deacons, a Chief Justice — and six men whose recorded name literally begins with “Conquistador.”
The 230-year-old man
Juan Garcia de la Riva is recorded 1670–1900. He is the wildest of 23 impossible ages in the file — a good reminder that every tree carries typos in its oldest branches.
Six Heinrichs, five Verenas
One Swiss family record lists 35 children (1622–1659), including six named Heinrich and five named Verena. Reusing a dead child’s name was normal; so was merging two families into one record.
Longest name on file
88 characters, buried in the Scottish branch:
“Sir James I ‘The Great Marquis of Montrose’ Graham, Scottish Poet, Knight of the Garter”
Method & caveats
Source: FamilyTree.ged, a RootsMagic GEDCOM 5.5.1 export (287,571 lines) carrying FamilySearch IDs on all 14,108 people. Parsed and analyzed with custom Python; every figure on this page was computed from the file, and headline claims were re-verified in a second pass.
- Coverage: 12,740 people have a birth year, 9,596 a death year, 12,407 a birthplace; 4,579 of the 4,645 recorded marriages carry a date.
- Averages exclude the impossible: lifespans over 110 years (23 records) are left out of all statistics, and “oldest fathers/mothers” claims were checked for internal consistency (several failed).
- Generations count Jacob as 0; “direct ancestors” means the 2,876 distinct people in his pedigree; relationships like “10th-great-grandfather” use each ancestor’s shortest path.
- Deep lines deserve doubt. Exact dates in the 1400s–1500s, a Reeves “born in Toulouse, 1465,” a bride named Capet — community trees grow speculative at the edges. Everything from generation ~10 back is best read as family legend with citations pending.
- Charts follow a validated colorblind-safe palette; every chart’s data is also available as a table via “view data.”