Tag: Level-up Challenge

Not Quite “Fun With Flags With Sheldon Cooper”, it’s “Fun With Pedigree Charts”!

Check It Out was a gawd-awful Canadian sitcom that ran on CTV in the mid-80s. When it first aired, I only watched it because it starred Don Adams, better known for his role on Get Smart as Agent 86 Maxwell Smart. Get Smart was my absolute favourite show when I started watching it in reruns when I was four. My mother tells me that in kindergarten I would not respond to my teacher unless she called me “Max”, something I can actually remember doing. I own the entire series on DVD. Unfortunately, Check It Out was as terrible as Get Smart was terrific. How Check It Out got Don Adams is beyond me. Not every Canadian sitcom can be Corner Gas or Schitt’s Creek.

“Check it Out” is also the theme for Week 14 of the 52 Ancestors Challenge. Like the Flowers theme of Week 11, this week’s theme didn’t really inspire me at first. However, in the Facebook post introducing the theme, “check it out” could be a direction to look at something that might be “something neat”. This reminded me of something I was thinking of posting to this blog outside of the 52 Ancestors Challenge.

In a Twitter post six years ago, David Allen Lambert, Chief Genealogist at New England Historic Genealogical Society, suggested creating a “longevity pedigree”, a pedigree chart showing the ages ancestors lived to rather than their names. I thought that was pretty neat, so I created my own. At the time most people, myself included, simply created hand-written charts that we tweeted. For this blog, I tidied it up.

Shortly afterwards, the idea was adapted for birthplace. Here is mine.

It’s interesting how homogenous it is on my father’s side compared to my mother’s. While it is much more varied on my mother’s side, the variety increases as you go back along my paternal grandfather’s line.

Of course, looking only at a person’s birthplace can be deceptive. For my ancestors born in the Russian Empire, they were neither Russian nor Ukrainian. They were Germans who settled in what is now Ukraine in the 19th century, forming part of a larger group known as Germans from Russia. I have mentioned these ancestors in this blog several times before.

For fun, I did a birthplace pedigree for our kids.

There are all sorts of other kinds of pedigrees like these that you can make. One example I’ve seen is people creating pedigrees for their ancestors’ religions. Another I’ve seen is an occupation pedigree. Then there was this mysterious pedigree Yvette Hoitink posted to Twitter:

It was her introduction of the Level-Up Challenge, which involves improving the evidentiary foundation for each ancestor in your family tree. While I haven’t “officially” undertaken the Level-up Challenge, I find I’ve been sort of doing it for a few of my lines without actually setting out to do so.

What kinds of interesting variations of a pedigree chart have you created?