A Family's Increase

It's Sunday morning, and everyone except me is still asleep. Time for Randy's Saturday Night Genealogy Fun challenge.

The challenge this week:

1) Pick one of your four great-grandparents - if possible, the one with the most descendants.

2) Create a descendants list for those great-grandparents either by hand or in your software program.

3) Tell us how many descendants, living or dead, are in each generation from those great-grandparents.

4) How many are still living? Of those, how many have you met and exchanged family information with? Are there any that you should make contact with ASAP? Please don't use last names of living people for this - respect their privacy.

5) Write about it in your own blog post, in comments to this post, or in comments or a Note on Facebook.

This is a tough one: You are more likely to meet me in a dusty archive, studying ancient church books, than at a family reunion, chatting with second cousins about their offspring. But let's give it a try.

1. The great-grandparents with the most descendants are probably my maternal grandmother's parents, Hendrikus Franciscus Coppens (1872-1945) and Johanna Petronella Moerman (1875-1953).
2. I don't know all descendants, but I have listed the ones I know. In some cases, I know a couple has children but I don't know their names, so I just wrote down the numbers. I will not list them here as most are still alive.
3. The descendants in each generation:
   1. They had seven children, one (my grandmother) is still alive.
   2. Ten grandchildren, as far as I know all still alive (though several spouses passed away). All ten showed up on my grandmother's 90th birthday for a cousin-only reunion (ten cousins and my grandmother, no spouses or other relatives).
   3. Now it gets harder... I think there are 18 in my generation. All of them living, as far as I know.
   4. I counted 23, but almost certainly there are more.
   5. It's quite possible there are a few young children in this generation, but I'm not aware of any.
4. Of the 58 descendants I counted, 52 are probably still alive. I met three of the six that passed away (the other three died long before I was born). I met most (or all?) of the 10 grandchildren and 18 great-grandchildren when I was a child. Later in life I met or corresponded with a few of them (some of them contacted me after discovering my website). As the focus of my genealogy research is ancestors, not cousins, I don't think I need to get in touch with any of my second cousins, at least not to get genealogy help. Via my grandmother I already received copies of documents in the possession of her nieces, and I don't expect there is any more information that I don't have yet. So no, I don't have to make contact with anyone ASAP.
5. Done.

Files: Hendrikus Franciscus Coppens, Johanna Petronella Moerman