Do You Have a Four or Five Generation Photo?
How rare are photographs with five generations in them. Or even four? Are six generation pictures possible?
I started thinking about this while scanning some old family pictures. This 1982 picture below includes my grandmother; my mother (in blue dress); my sister, standing on the left: my sister's daughter; and her newborn child. All proud mothers. Five generations in one picture.
Th age for each person in the photo at the time is listed in the bullets below. The number in parenthses is each one's age when their child was born. For example, the grandmother was 41 years old when the picture was taken, and was 21 years old when she had her daughter.
- Great-Great-Grandmother: 84 (21)
- Great-Grandmother: 63 (21)
- Grandmother: 41 (21)
- Mother: 21 (21)
- Daughter: 3 Months
Now, this was eerie. Each one of them gave birth at age 21 to their respective child. Making such discoveries is part of the fun; I did not realize this about my grandmother, mother, and each of them until I started this exercise.
How Often Does This Happen?
I got to thinking further, and wondered how unique this was. Or how rare is it for six generations to be alive at one time?
I started up an Excel spreadsheet and started playing with numbers. xxxxxxx to write down everyone's age and date when they had their chldren.
It become fairly confusing, but with some trial and error, I was able to produce some interesting numbers.
Here is a friendlier chart that shows how difficult it is to have four-, five-, or even six-generation pictures. Of course a determining factor is, how long did the oldest person live? |
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As you can see, three generations are no big deal. Even if the oldest person only lived to 60; three generations could be alive as long as each successive generation had a child by 30 years of age; and so on. Four generations are quite common also.
I have not witnessed any six-generation families or pictures. As you can see, it would take a combination of the oldest ancestor living close to 100, and the mothers birthing children by 20 years of age, on average.
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Four Generations
Great-grandmothers were common in our family. Here are three of the same people from the earlier picture, in a 1942 four-generation photo. It is one generation up. The woman in the center, is the great-great-grandmother in the earlier picture. That is her mother to her right. My mother is holding my sister. The great-grandmother in this photo, died just 10 months before she would have become a great-great-grandmother.
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