| It sounded so absurd the first time I became
aware of this phrase about a third of a century
ago. It was on a sign along Marriottsville Road
in Howard County, MD, and it definitely caught my
attention. It's so counterintuitive, and it seems
to defy logic. How can less be more? I just
experienced an example that shows how less can
clearly be more, much more.
I'm always aiming for the kind of strategic
additions to the Family Forest that produce big
changes with only a little input. In this case,
just deleting a person produced a huge change
that personally relates to possibly tens of
millions of living people.
An ancestor chart of Lady Elizabeth Gascoigne
had only 2 boxes filled in, her and her father.
Her sisters, Anne & Dorothy Gascoigne have
79,720 boxes filled in on a 20 generation
ancestor chart, and 1,068,803 boxes filled in on
a 30 generation ancestor chart.
Although Elizabeth correctly showed up on the
family page with her sisters, she was incorrectly
attached to a duplicate entry of her father, Sir
William Gascoigne. All I had to do was to delete
the duplicate of her father, and instantly,
everyone downstream of Elizabeth now has an
additional million-plus fully-sourced boxes of
their ancestry mapped out.
Lady Elizabeth Gascoigne was said to have
married Sir George Talboys (Tailboys, Tailbois,
etc.) before 1493. She could have had hundreds of
descendants who were each producing families in
the early 1600's. If others are correct in saying
that a single couple that lived in the early
1600's can have a million descendants living
today, it seems reasonable to believe that Lady
Elizabeth may have tens of millions of living
descendants.
For all of those descendants (and there are a
large number of them) who have multiple ancestral
pathways leading to Lady Elizabeth Gascoigne and
her husband, Sir George Talboys, this one simple
deletion means that two million or more of their
additional ancestral connections are now mapped
out in the Family Forest.
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