Randy Seaver, author of Genea-Musings, always comes up with a
fun challenge each weekend. This time he prompted me to explore a genealogical
numbering system I’ve never used before. Here’s his “mission”:
Your mission, should you
decide to accept it (cue the Mission Impossible! music) is to:
1) Do you know what
a "Henry Number" is? It is a descendant numbering system from a
specific person. The Wikipedia article for Genealogical
Numbering Systems describes it as:
"The Henry System is
a descending system created by Reginald
Buchanan Henry for a genealogy of the families of the presidents of
the United States that he wrote in 1935.[3] It
can be organized either by generation or not. The system begins with 1. The
oldest child becomes 11, the next child is 12, and so on. The oldest child of
11 is 111, the next 112, and so on. The system allows one to derive an
ancestor's relationship based on their number. For example, 621 is the first
child of 62, who is the second child of 6, who is the sixth child of his
parents. In the Henry System, when there are more than nine children, X
is used for the 10th child, A is used for the 11th child, B is used for the
12th child, and so on. In the Modified Henry System, when there are more than
nine children, numbers greater than nine are placed in parentheses."
2) Go to your first
known ancestor with your birth surname and calculate your Henry Number from
that person. Show each generation of your line of ancestors with your
birth surname with their Henry numbers.
3) How did you
calculate the Henry numbers? What do these numbers tell you?
4) Tell us in your
own blog post, in a comment on this blog post, or in a Facebook or Google+
post.
My first known ancestor with
my birth surname, Ballenger, is Charles Ballenger, born 29 March 1815, possibly
in Fairfax County, Virginia. He lived most of his adult life in Athens County,
Ohio, then moved to Delaware County, where he died 19 October 1891. According
to the Henry system that Randy explained, Charles is ancestor number 1.
Here is my Ballenger line with
their Henry numbers:
1 Charles Ballenger (1815-1891)
18 James Madison Ballenger (1855-1913)
181 Charles Cleveland
Ballenger (1882-1953)
1813 Lloyd
Russell Ballenger (1911-2002)
18132 Edward Ballenger
(living)
181321 Shelley Ballenger Bishop (living)
Figuring out the Henry
numbers was relatively easy, because I already have a complete list of the
children in each generation. I simply went to my family database in Reunion for Mac, my software of choice, and found the birth order for each of my direct
ancestors (all males, since this is my birth surname). I also consulted a
previous blog post, Surname Saturday: Ballenger Family, which gives the names
of everyone in the families. I had to make one decision: whether or not to
count an unnamed infant who lived only four hours (she was an older sister of
Lloyd Ballenger, my grandfather). I did count her, because she was a very real
baby to her parents, which made Lloyd their third-born child.
The most widely accepted
genealogical numbering systems today are the Register System, developed in 1870
and used by the New England Historic and
Genealogical Register, and the NGSQ System, developed in 1912 by the National Genealogical Society Quarterly.
The NGSQ System is sometimes called the Modified Register System. A short book
published by the National Genealogical Society called Numbering Your Genealogy provides a good overview of both of these
systems, and it also briefly describes the Henry System.
While I don’t think I’ll ever
use the Henry System in my own research or writing, it was fun to experiment
with it. I’ve read about it before, but there’s nothing like a good hands-on
exercise to help me understand it. Isn’t that true of a lot of things?
--Shelley
Related Posts:
Happy Blogiversary Shelley! Congrats on 3 years of blogging.
ReplyDeleteThanks so much, Karen! It had slipped past me, so a special thanks for the reminder!
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