Do you know the names of your grandparents? Your great-grandparents?

 

An unsurprising poll from Ancestry.com indicates the following:

LEHI, Utah -- March 30, 2022 – Today, a new survey from Ancestry®, the leader in family history, found more than half (53%) of Americans can’t name all four grandparents – demonstrating a knowledge gap in key information about more recent family history. Released every 10 years, census records are one of the most valuable ways people can learn about their family’s past, as they provide rich insights into what an ancestor’s life was like at the time. 

Granted this is old news but my own experience confirms this finding and has for many years. My wife and I are grandparents to 34 grandchildren and two great-grandchildren. They are scattered all over the country and around the world. Other than Zoom meetings, very few of them have any regular direct contact with either of us. Despite our intense interest in genealogy, I am sure that half or more of them would be hard pressed to remember my wife's or my full names as well as the names of their other pair of grandparents. As an editorial comment, if you read the article from Ancestry.com, the survey was merely part of an ad campaign for the release of the 1950 U.S. Federal Census. By the way, the census does not always get names correctly recorded and rarely includes the full name of the people surveyed so the census is not much help in knowing anyone's full name. 

I never knew my paternal grandparents. Both of them died before I was born. My maternal grandfather died when I was a teenager and my last remaining grandmother died when I was still quite young and spent her last years with dementia in a care center. It is estimated that about 83% of the U.S. population live in large cites compared to about 64% in 1950. (See U.S. Cities Factsheet). According to the U.S. Census Bureau, in 2022, more than half of the population of the United States is now composed of single adults. (See Unmarried and Single Americans Week: September 18-24, 2022). However, it is interesting that about 16% of the U.S. population lives in a multigenerational family situation, mainly due to economic considerations. (See 3-Generation Families) We live in a neighborhood with large houses, and it is common for the houses to have a separate basement apartment. Due to the economy, it is the rule rather than the exception that we have two or more families living in the same house. But we also have houses occupied solely by one or two single adults. 

Going forward, all these statistics will have a major impact on how genealogy is recorded and analyzed in the future. Another statistic indicates that about 40% of the children born in the United States were born out of wedlock. As a genealogist, I am fully aware of the difficulty of documenting the parentage of people in this category. In recent years, DNA has helped many discover their birth parents, but many others are not able to do so. 

As I have written in the past, genealogists commonly claim that there is a huge interest worldwide in searching out family history or ancestry. It is true that millions of people have taken genealogical DNA tests with the major companies, but very few of these people have taken the next step by discovering who they are related to by researching a family tree. Even those who would seem to have a natural interest due to culture or religion are not aware of their family roots. 

All this means that genealogists have an increasingly greater burden to preserve all the family history we can as fast as we can. Fortunately, we have the online, electronic tools to do so. Stay tuned for more comments about the future of genealogy.