Fun with Internet Search

The obituary for Elder Ballard says he is survived by seven children, 43 grandchildren, 105 great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild. So at first glance at least one of the Elder Ballard’s children had as many children as Ballard and his wife did. The ratio of great-grandchildren to grandchildren is 2.4. What might that ratio grow to with future births?

I am not interested in Elder Ballard’s family per se, but I find it a case put in my lap of a faithful Mormon public figure, who had several children and whose children had several children, that I might use to ponder what the drop-off in fecundity may be for the current generation involved in having children. It is also a big enough family that individual cases of involuntary limited fertility shouldn’t throw off the population-scale picture.

The first useful piece of information in that direction is the obituary for Elder Ballard’s wife Barbara who died in 2018. It says she was survived by 43 grandchildren and 90 great-grandchildren. It also names her seven children and their spouses. Public information for five of the seven couples is available giving ages of the men and number of children. Two of Elder Ballard’s sons-in-law were called as mission presidents, and also Ballard’s youngest son Craig. Another son-in-law died in 2016, and an obituary is available, and a fourth son-in-law is a public figure with a Wikipedia page. Regarding Craig Ballard, there was a Deseret News article in 2014 about his four sons doing eagle scout projects to benefit Ghana. The article named all four of them and their two sisters and gave the ages of the minors and enough about the older ones to approximate closely that the six today range from 29-years-old to 19-years-old.

Regarding Elder Ballard’s older son, nothing readily popped up, and I have no desire to search out anything in this matter that doesn’t pop up readily. One of Ballard’s daughters also does not definitively show up; possibly her husband is a city councilman in Beaver, Utah; maybe the same person the Beaver Press reported administering the sacrament for the Beaver 1st Ward on August 10, 1986. (I am trying not to get personal, but a few details that emerge are too fun, and others are too sad.)

Craig, the youngest Ballard child, is 53 with six children ranging in age from 29 to 19. Four of Elder Ballard’s daughters have husbands who were born 60, 66, 68, and 68 years ago. Those daughters respectively had 8, 8, 6, and 6 children. The obituary of Elder Ballard’s son-in-law David Roper in 2016 says that a daughter, Emily Roper, died before Elder Ballard’s daughter became a widow. Another obituary comes up for the death of Elder Ballard’s grandson Daniel Joseph Roper in 2019 at age 28. That was after the death of Elder Ballard’s wife, so it is likely that Elder Ballard was really survived by 42 grandchildren, not 43 just as his wife was, and I will guess that Emily Roper would make the total grandchild count (living and dead) 44, but there may be other early tragic deaths that did not pop up like these two.

Elder Ballard and his wife married 72 years ago. The son and daughter that I found nothing on account between them for eight of Elder Ballard’s 42 surviving grandchildren, and I will just assume those two children came early in Elder Ballard’s marriage and that those eight grandchildren are all past having more children of their own. From the other four daughters and the younger son I could suppose that there would be: 8 grandchildren from 37 to 20 years old, 8 from 43 to 26, 5 from 44 to 32, 6 from 44 to 29, and 6 from 29 to 19.

So the job is to estimate from all this the fraction of Elder Ballard’s great-grandchildren yet to be born, and then with that projected total find the ratio of great-grandchildren to grandchildren, and see how that ratio will compare with the 6.3 grandchild to child ratio.