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I recently began a project of trying to identify as many living descendants of Peter and Eva Catherine Simmon as possible. I opened a spreadsheet and started typing in the names I know of. I entered info for my immediate family, then my cousins, aunts and uncles, my cousins’ children, etc. Then I entered the members of the family Facebook group (just focusing on direct descendants, not spouses), plus anyone on the annual newsletter mailing list (if different from the Facebook group), and anyone I had encountered on Ancestry.com or via email or direct message. That yielded about 50 names. Next, I started making specific inquiries to family members I’m connected with to help me fill out their portions of the family and included as many names as I could find. I’m still in that process, but I’m up to a little over 70 names now (in April 2022). 

It got me thinking. Just how many living descendants are there in the world today? How large of a task had I undertaken?

The more I learn, the more convinced I am that the actual number of living descendants of Peter and Catherine Simmon is huge. I’m just over 70 names right now and it feels like I am just barely scratching the surface.

There are seven lines of descendants — one for each of Peter and Catherine’s children who had children of their own: Phillip, Jacob Henry, Caroline Louisa, Charles, Catherine Phillipian, Henry Jacob, and Elizabeth. Just looking at the line I have the most info about, Henry Jacob Simmon’s (the line I am descended from), there are easily hundreds of people I haven’t found yet.

And of the 70 some-odd living direct descendants I currently know about, only 24 of them are not descended from Henry Jacob.

Henry Jacob had seven children of his own. Of these, I’m most familiar with the Arthur Eaton branch (because it’s my branch), but even there, I don’t know about all the living descendants — I probably don’t even know half of them! Arthur Eaton had five children, who all had children of their own. I know about all nineteen living descendants from his son Orville (my grandfather) and I am getting a more complete picture of the living descendants from my great aunt Mary Jane, but there are three other great aunts whose children and grandchildren and great grandchildren are not on my list at all!

And that’s just my grandfather’s generation. Go back another generation and the problem is compounded many times over. I am aware of some of the descendants of three of Henry Jacob’s sons, (my great grandfather and two of his brothers). Their sister Isabel never married or had children, but there are three other children who did. George William Simmon (1863–1934) had six children, Albert Joseph Simmon (1866–1943) had two, and Catherine Eva (Simmon) Couch (1870–1936) had two.

Bear with me here. Henry Jacob Simmon had seven children. The number of children that each of those siblings had was as follows: 4, 6, 2, 0, 2, 7, and 5. That’s 26 grandchildren for Henry Jacob and Mary Allemang Simmon. Divide 26 grandchildren by the seven siblings and you get an average number of 3.71 children per sibling (which is close to the average number of children per family in the US in 1900, which was 3.56). So we should be able to infer a number of living descendants today by extrapolating from that average. 

The tricky bit is, the average number of children per American family has dropped in the decades since 1900. The rate looks like this (Source):

1900 – 3.56
1920 – 3.17
1940 – 2.22
1960 – 3.62 (baby boom)
1980 – 1.84
2000 – 2.05
2018 – 1.73 (this is when the report was published but I checked and numbers since 2018 appear to be very similar)

There are seven data points, so again, if we add those rates and divide by seven, we can get the average number of children per US family since 1900, which turns out to be about 2.6. So…

• Henry Jacob and Mary Allemang Simmon had seven children.
• Those seven siblings had 26 grandchildren. This is my grandfather’s generation and most of that generation has passed, so we will not count them in our estimate of living descendants.
• 26 grandchildren x 2.6 = 67.6 great grandchildren (my parents’ generation). 
• 67.6 great grandchildren x 2.6 = 175.76 gr-gr grandchildren. (my generation)
• 175.76 gr-gr grandchildren x 2.6 = 456.976 (let’s just say 457) gr-gr-gr grandchildren (mostly millennials and zoomers today, some of whom are entering family-raising age)

If we add those last three results together, we get an estimate of about 700 living descendants just from Henry Jacob Simmon’s line in 2022. I have identified less than one tenth of that number!

The number is probably actually a bit lower than 700 because the bulk of people in that estimate were born in the last 25-30 years, when the average number of children per family was a bit lower than 2.6 (though not much lower, in 2000 it was 2.5).

Henry Jacob is just one of seven lines descended from Peter and Catherine Simmon, though he had the most grandchildren of all the siblings. I went ahead and applied this exact same method to the other six lines of Simmon descendants, added them all together, and came up with 2,370 estimated living descendants of Peter and Catherine Simmon, alive today (in 2022).

That’s just counting generations 5 – 7 (Peter and Catherine were generation-1, their nine children were generation-2, and so on). I believe there is only one generation-4 descendant (a great grandchild or Peter and Catherine) still living (I could be wrong but I have good reasons to think so). I do know of a small handful of generation-8 kids and there are almost certainly more of them out there, especially in the Caroline Louisa Deifenbach and Phillip Simmon lines, as they started their families earlier than the other siblings. But because generation-8 is in the process of being born, I can’t make a reliable estimate of who is currently living based on this method. 

So, I have identified 70 some-odd living descendants of Peter and Catherine and I only have 2,300 more to go!