What are Ancestor Lists and how do I use them?
Occasionally someone will post an Ancestor List (or Ahnenlist, or Ahnenreihe) for a Medieval person. This will consist of a numbered list of persons without any explanation of how the persons are related to each other. The following explanation of the numbering scheme used in Ancestor Lists is slightly modified from a message posted to the group by Stewart Baldwin on 26 November 1998. The idea of Ancestor Lists is simple. They provide a numbering system whereby all of the known ancestors of a single individual can be listed in such a way that no two different ancestors receive the same number, and such that the numbers themselves are enough to deduce the claimed relationships. An Ancestor List starts with the individual in question (i.e., the person whose ancestors are to be traced) as number 1, for example: • Charles II, king of Great Britain (1630-85). The parents of that individual are then numbered as follows: • father of number 1, and • mother of number 1, or, in the example above
