Understanding Family Generations
One of the first things that surprises people when they begin exploring their family history is how quickly the numbers grow. Go back just a few generations and you have not two or three ancestors to think about, but dozens — each with their own story, their own place, their own life.
How Generations Work
In a traditional family structure, each generation doubles the number of direct ancestors you have. Every person has two parents, four grandparents, eight great-grandparents, and so on. The table below shows how this adds up:
| Generation | Relationship | Number of Ancestors |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Parents | 2 |
| 2 | Grandparents | 4 |
| 3 | Great-grandparents | 8 |
| 4 | Great-great-grandparents | 16 |
| 5 | 3× great-grandparents | 32 |
| 6 | 4× great-grandparents | 64 |
| 7 | 5× great-grandparents | 128 |
By the time you reach seven generations back — roughly to the mid-1700s for most people alive today — you have potentially 128 direct ancestors. In practice the number is often a little lower due to what genealogists call pedigree collapse, where distant cousins married one another, as was common in small rural communities like those in Cornwall and Devon that feature in this family history.
What a Generation Means in Years
A generation is typically estimated at around 25 to 30 years, though this varies considerably. In earlier centuries, when people married younger and had children earlier, generations could be shorter. In more recent times they have tended to lengthen.
As a rough guide:
| If you were born around... | Your great-grandparents were likely born around... |
|---|---|
| 1990 | 1900–1910 |
| 1960 | 1870–1890 |
| 1930 | 1840–1860 |
This helps place ancestors in their historical context. Lavinia Grace Facey, born in 1874, was living through the reign of Queen Victoria. Bob Renals, born in 1893, was a young man when the First World War began.
Why Great-Great-Grandparents Matter
Your great-great-grandparents sit at a particularly interesting point in family history research. For most people alive today they were born in the mid to late 1800s — a period for which parish records, census returns, and civil registration records are increasingly available and searchable online.
They also connect you to a world very different from our own. Many of the great-great-grandparents in this family were miners, labourers, and farmers in rural Cornwall and Devon. Few could read or write — as the marriage record of Francis Renals and Grace Clemens in 1848 shows, both signed with a mark rather than a signature. Understanding their lives helps explain the migrations, the name variations, and the family patterns that run through the generations that followed.
On This Site
This family history traces the Renals, Bewes, Facey, Orchard and related families across several generations. The earliest figures currently documented were born in the early 1800s. As research continues, those lines will be extended further back.