Ancestor Table (Ahnentafel) for Peter Symon

All ancestors for whom a record has been found, were born in Scotland.  Most of them also died in Scotland, where registration of burials was not an official requirement until 1855.   Researches have been limited by the fact that pre-1855 registration of burials in Scotland was very patchy or, in many areas, non-existent.  (Official recording of burials was introduced in England some three centuries earlier, by Thomas Cromwell, after Henry VIII's split with the Church of Rome.)

Another problem is that quite a lot of my ancestors appear to have been members of congregations of seceding presbyterian churches during the 18th and 19th centuries.   Such churches were popular in Perthshire and Fife, where a large number of the ancestors lived.  Registers of baptisms and marriages have mostly not survived, if they were indeed ever kept. 

As commonly encountered in Scottish genealogical research, parish registration of births, baptisms and marriages frequently did not give any detail of the mother, in the case of births and baptisms, or of the parents of the bride and groom, in the case of marriages.

It has still been possible to overcome such obstacles in many branches of the family tree.  In some cases, up to ten generations of proven linked ancestors have been identified.  (That's roughly a twentieth of the time since the mesolithic population of northwest Europe.) 

Ancestors have been numbered systematically.  I am numbered 1 (and so are my siblings).  Thereafter, all male ancestors are given even numbers and all female ancestors are given odd numbers, starting with paternal father then mother, followed by maternal father then mother.  So my father is 2 and my mother is 3.  My father's father is 4 and his mother is 5.  My mother's father is 6 and her mother is 7.  Genealogists call the above numering methodology the "Eyzinger-Sosa-Stradonitz" system .

To remount one generation from an ancestor, double the number to get the number of that ancestor's father and add one to that number to get the mother's number.    For the next generation back, do exactly the same calculation.  And so on and so forth. 

A longer term project is to research and document lines of descents from  ancestors, other than the descendancy on which the records have been organised.  Descendancy tables are presented here.