You're right, Frances. I should have read through all those messages, but there are so many, and those long blocks of dense text are so very tiring to read that I gave up after about 60 messages and skimmed the other 60. Somehow I'd gained the impression that there was more than just word of mouth to substantiate Mrs Rosa's adamant claim that her direct ancestor, Patrick Cain b circa 1737, was born on the Isle of Man.

It would be interesting to know the statistics for arriving at a ball-park figure for the likely total number of living direct descendants of the 6x great grandfather of a late-middle-aged person (ie 2 additional younger generations also alive) ---- so the sum of all the 6x, 7x and 8x great grandchildren. And that wouldn't take into account the branches of the family who had procreated relatively young and had produced 12 generations in the same period, and who would be likely to have 4 or even 5 generations alive simultaneously. I'm doing my best here to rack up the figures so that my earlier guess (plucked out of thin air) doesn't seem so ridiculous !

Jean C