The Family Tree Notebooks Index is pre-printed to cover a root person and their parents through 4th great-grandparents. One of the questions I get asked often is what can someone do if they’re family tree stretches back farther than that last generation?
If you’re in that position, you have a couple of options. You could use the blank index page to continue adding in new generations of biological ancestors. However, fair warning: the generations get very large as you push further on with biology.
- We are each (1) person.
- We have (2) biological parents.
- We have (4) biological grandparents.
- We have (8) biological great-grandparents.
- We have (16) biological 2nd great-grandparents.
- We have (32) biological 3rd great-grandparents.
- We have (64) biological 4th great-grandparents.
- We have (128) biological 5th great-grandparents.
- We have (256) biological 6th great-grandparents.
- We have (512) biological 7th great-grandparents.
And so on.
The pre-printed index holds space for 127 people if you don’t count the blank spaces. By adding just one more generation, you double the size of the book! (For those of you who are just desperate for those 5th great-grandparents, I do have an index expansion pack.)
A more manageable option is to finish a book using the pre-printed book the way it is and then start new books with the lines you want to continue. If you have a 4th great-grandparent whose ancestry you want to keep exploring, make them a root person in a new book and keep going (being sure to make a note in their chapter in the first book).
I like to remind people that the goal isn’t to get our entire forever-and-ever family tree into one book. That would be a giant book that nobody would be able to tackle, either as a researcher or as a reader. Break your family into bite-sized pieces so your audience can digest it. Will you make a lot of books before you’re done? Maybe. Lucky us!
