Why did I create another numbering system? To try and deliver as much information in as little space as possible. I did this several years ago when I was planning on having my entire family history on the web in detail. As I am no longer going to do that some of the reasons given here will no longer be applicable.

While trying to come up with a system, I kept several questions in mind.

• How can I tell people how I am related to the people on my list without having to respond to dozens of e-mails.
• How can someone looking at a name in my collection tell how interested I am in following that name backwards. This relates greatly to the first question.
• It has to be expandable, for I don't know what I will dig up.
• It has to be easy to read.

I also made a few assumptions

• Most people are more interested in tracing "their" ancestors rather than a relatives ancestors or descendants.
• Most people's ancestors will not have gone overboard with multiple marriages or births.
• Unless you are Mormon, there will only be one or two people in your family that are researching a family tree. This means that you won't have to worry about multiple family histories referring to the same person with different numbers.

I started this system a few years ago for my ancestors. I used a variation of the binary system. 1 for male and 2 for female. No sexism here. Using zeros would have been hard for a computer (no difference between 0000 and 000000). As my tree started with me, and I'm a male (last time I checked), I used 1 for male. I would add another number on for each generation.

This is primarily an aid to find relatedness to "me". My cousin would have a different number for his brother than I would. As there is usually only a few researching the family history, this will not become too confusing.

I find this much quicker than the Ahnentafel system. Quickly now, who is 43, how many generations back are they and which side of the family are they from. Now look at the same person in my system, 112122. This is;

    1   1         2         1         2         2
    my  father's  mother's  father's  mother's  mother
or  my  great     great     great     grand     mother
  

She is five generations back on my fathers side.

The more numbers in the reference, the more distant that person is from myself. The more periods in the reference, the less likely I will be researching that name. The only other way I could think of showing the relatedness to me was to include a picture of my family tree. It would either be a very large download, or several smaller ones as the person tried to find the link to "me".

35 children and an unlimited number of spouses seems reasonably flexible to me. Yes there may be some renumbering involved if a "new" child is discovered. This will only happen in more distant relative's families. This makes the chance of having to renumber a large number of people slim.

Yes, this system can lead to extremely large numbers. Since most people are looking for their immediate ancestors, the larger the number the more successful the search has been. If the number has a lot of periods in it, it may be time to refocus the search.