Following a family

I’m attempting to write a novel following a family history – from the point of view of someone now using the internet and other means to research their family line. My story is going to be totally fictitious, not based on any real person, from the past or from the present. However, just to explore the possibilities of how a family might spread, I’ve been looking at some unusual names and tracing them just through census material. The character in my novel arrives in England in the 1830’s from eastern Europe… so if there was just him, and he married and had children, how far would his descendants spread, and how many would there be in 2013?

I am looking at the 1841 census and there is a young family, father and mother, Lewis and Mary, and their two children, Sophia, Elizabeth and Abraham; there are also two lodgers,  lodger called Betsey and Rosa (who is foreign… so on my imaginary 1841 census return, my character would be written as ‘foreign’) By the time ten years have passed, the oldest child Sophia is no longer at home, she’s married, but Elizabeth and Abraham have two siblings, Isaac and Thomas. By the time of the 1861 census, Abraham is married and has two children, Lewis named after his father and John and his sister Elizabeth has also married. Another ten years have passed and now Abraham has six sons and a daughter, and Isaac has two daughters and a son… of Thomas there is no trace; maybe he has died, maybe he has gone to one of the colonies. So within thirty years, the family of two parents and three children, has grown; the sons have ten children between them, and no doubt the daughters also have families. By 1881 there is another generation coming up, Lewis and Mary now have great-grandchildren…

In my story, if I had a single man who appeared in the census in 1841, it is quite possible that he would have hundreds of descendants! However, for the purpose of my story, there had better not be too many people involved, it will be hard enough for me to keep track of them all, let alone my readers!