Your work on the FamilySearch Family Tree will never be "Done"

Some processes and activities and our lives on earth all have a definite beginning point and an end. Genealogy changes with every new birth and never really ends. I suppose you could take an apocalyptic view and claim that genealogy would end if the world were destroyed but that is not something that I can integrate into my plans for the future right now. Of course, this topic comes from so many people who say that their family history is all done. 

The answer to the assertion that the work in the Family Tree is all done comes from a simple geometric progression: 2, 4, 8, 16, 32, etc. Whether or not you can individually identify a certain ancestor, even a parent or grandparent, is immaterial to the reality that everyone has two parents. As far as identifying close relatives, DNA testing has added a new dimension to the age-old genealogical problem of adoptions and foundlings. The DNA experience now entails finding connections with relatives we never knew existed.

Of course, the geometric progression of the number of our ancestors is dwarfed by the number of their descendants. Even allowing for pedigree collapse, the number of potential relatives is immense. 

But the true issue is a practical one: how far is it realistically possible to extend a family line? All record streams ultimately end. Governments cease to exist and records eventually disappear. In working with people over the years I have heard claims of family trees with tens of thousands of individuals and even hundreds of thousands. After spending almost 38 years examining, researching, correcting, standardizing, and working over my own family lines, I find it harder and harder to believe any verified claims to huge pedigrees. I also commonly find such claims to be, for the most part, founded on name extraction methods, where the "researcher" copies names by surname from records without regard for establishing documented relationships. I have yet to examine any family tree with verifiable extended pedigrees in Europe going back before 1500 A.D. I do know of individual Chinese or other Far Eastern genealogies that go back over 2000 years, but these genealogies usually fail to record any female names and have limited references to descendants.

One good example of the overwhelming number of possible relatives is the number of my DNA matches on the MyHeritage.com website. As of the date of this post, I have 8,485 DNA matches and I do not know more than a handful of these living people who are apparently related to me. In addition, most of these people do not have a family tree on the website that would enable me or the program to identify even our common ancestors much less all of those relatives we have in common. In fact, the number of potential DNA matches is more than double the number of people I have in that particular MyHeritage family tree.

My portion of the FamilySearch.org Family Tree has one or two verified family lines back 13 generations to where I would have 4,096 potential grandparents. We can only guess at the number of descendants those 4,096 people might have today.

OK, here is my challenge, if you want to know if your genealogy is all done and you doubt my explanation of why that is not possible, I suggest you give me about half an hour of your time examining your pedigree and I will show you where your lines realistically end and where you could do more research. Simple.