I have never been much of a numbers person. Math was never my strong suit in school, and still I shy away from all things numerical. Imagine my horror when I was reading about methods for organizing genealogy research and came across – gasp – numbering systems.
It turns out that many genealogists use numbers to organize the information that they collect about their ancestors. There are established numbering systems that help genealogists organize their research so that they can easily follow any line of ancestors through their family tree. The numbering systems identify individuals and their relationships to each other. One system, the ahnentafel system, assigns numbers based upon the ancestors of an individual while most of the other systems go in the other direction, assigning numbers based upon the descendants of an individual.
The three most popular numbering formats are the aforementioned ahnentafel system, the Register numbering system, and the NGSQ numbering system. Many genealogists like the ahnentafel system if they are organizing their research in an ascending manner and they want to present a lot of information in a compact form. The Register system and the NGSQ system are similar in that they are both based upon descendants. The Register system was created by the New England Historical and Genealogical Society in 1870, and it is used for publishing genealogies in the New England Historical and Genealogical Register. It is important to note that this particular system is best used for final publication and not for works in progress because you would have to do a lot of renumbering as you continued adding information to your body of research.
Given the limitations of the Register system, it is no surprise that it has been modified and updated into something that is easier to use. The National Genealogical Society created the NGSQ system, and it is more flexible than the Register system. The most important difference, and the trait from which its ease of use and comprehensiveness stems, is that every individual gets a number regardless of whether they have descendants.
If you are thinking about publishing your family history, you will have to get acquainted with genealogy numbering systems. I, for one, currently have no plan to publish my family history so I get to ignore those numbers – at least for now.
Photo by Cohdra on morguefile.com.