How Many is Too Many?

After reviewing my old story notes and gleaning out the usable bits, I turned to my characters. Some of them are developing nicely but I knew that there are others that need to be there and weren't yet. So, once again, I opened a spread sheet and started entering them in: first column for character's name, second column for brief description, third column for father's name, fourth column for mother's name, fifth column for spouse's name, and sixth column for children(s)' names.

Example:
1 2 3 4 5 6
John carpenter Ralph Susan Marie Jane and Michael
Ralph carpenter XX XX Susan John
Susan unknown XX XX Ralph John

I entered the ones I already knew and then determined which of those for each character is important and which are not. For the ones I won't need, i.e. I don't need to know certain character's parents, I placed XX to let me know this can stay blank. For the blanks that need to be filled in, I highlighted the cell to remind me to come back to it.

This may seem redundant by entering every name several times but by entering every name where it applied it was easy to see what other characters need to be named.

What I really like about doing it this way is that after I entered all the names I knew, I sorted the names alphabetically and realized that I was heavy on using certain letters to begin names.

Now my only question is how many characters are too many?? Many of the ones I need are minor characters or only mentioned and not actually a part of the action but I ended up with about 37 and I'm not through, yet. Hmmm...