Family history

Family history is the study of multiple generations of people who appear to be related. The objective is to exhaustively document the effects of kinship. The audience comprises as many present or future family members as may be curious about this.

Introduction

While genealogy is the convenient label for the field, family history is the over-arching term, since genealogy in the strict sense is only concerned with tracing unified lineages. Other sectors of family history, such as one-name studies, may pay only rudimentary attention to lineages, or may emphasize biography rather than vital data. Most genealogical societies in Britain are united in the Federation of Family History Societies.

Forms of family-history research include:

genealogy (tracing a living person's pedigree back into time from the present, or an historic person's descendancy to the present, using archival records)
genetic genealogy (discovering relationships by comparing the DNA of living individuals);
one-name studies (an investigation of all persons with a common surname)
one-place studies (population histories including the German de:Ortsfamilienbuch)
heraldic and peerage studies (inquiries into the legal right of persons to bear arms or claim noble status)
clan studies (inquiries into groups with a shared patrilineal or matrilineal connection to a tribal chieftain and his servants, although they may not be related by blood and may not share the same surname)
family social and economic history (telling the story of a family's place in society or economic achievements using oral and written records, or inferring information about lives from wider historical sources; this subject is treated below)

Unlike related forms of micro-history, such as corporate histories or local studies, family history research begins with only an approximate notion of the extent of the entity - the extended family - and never fully defines it, since the early origins of all families become invisible in prehistorical times. DNA genealogy offers some hope of moving this boundary further back into time.

Motivation

Family history needs little justification in communitarian societies, where a person's identity is defined as much by their kin network as by individual achievement, and the question "Who are you?" would be answered by a description of father, mother and tribe. New Zealand Māori, for example, learn whakapapa (genealogies) in order to discover who they are.

In individualist societies, especially the English-speaking world, the need for family history is not self-evident and a reductionist view of it prevails: the family historian's chief motivation is to improve self-esteem.

Until the late 19th century, family histories were almost exclusively of interest to persons who had obtained their wealth or rank by inheritance. Other people, who had inherited nothing, might, in extreme cases, suppress their family history as a matter of shame.

In immigrant societies such as the United States or Australia, there was by the 20th century growing pride in the pioneers and nation-builders. Establishing descent from these was a concern in groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution, and helped differentiate those descendants from later immigrants with lower status.

In racist societies, such as Nazi Germany, family histories were compiled to affirm individuals' affiliation with the "master race".

Modern family history explores new sources of status, such as celebrating the resilience of families that survived generations of poverty or slavery, or the success of families in integrating across racial or national boundaries. Some family histories even emphasize links to celebrity criminals, such as the bushranger Ned Kelly in Australia.

In Germany, family history was misused by the Nazis and today is still often perceived as a threat to privacy rather than as a source of self-esteem. Most 20th-century sources remain unavailable to the public on privacy grounds. Funding of support for family history at archives is limited. German family historians thus tend to emphasize instead how family history can contribute to learning and science.

The single family history

In the narrower sense of the term, a family history is a biography of a single family over several generations, based on a tested genealogy and fleshed out with the fuller story of the family's place in society, the dramas of its achievements or failures and its acquisition or loss of wealth and rank.

Such a study mainly draws on oral history for the recent period and archival records for the period beyond living memory. Where an individual's own story is unknown, much can be inferred from other literature. For example, a single soldier's experiences can be inferred from the history of his military unit, or a migrant's journey can be described from the shipboard diary of a fellow traveller.

Conducting a Project

Family history can either be in the form of a printed document, electronic document or sound or video recording that preserves this history for future generations. The readers will expect it to describe where the family originated from, name the members of the family and state who they married.

Family Histories are often created as a memorial for the deceased and are written to be passed down to future generations.

Some records that are used to create family histories are:

Apprenticeship records
Baptism or Christening records
Birth certificates
Cemetery records and tombstones
Census records
Coroner's reports
Death records
Diaries, personal letters and family Bibles
Military records
Newspapers - both news items and advertisements
Wills and probate records

Today many people are using these old records to recover their family history. But most of these records include only technical details of a person's life, such as their birth date, whom they married, the jobs they did, and so forth, but they contain very little about the person themselves such as their likes, dislikes, hobbies, hopes and dreams.

Family History websites and indexes are also useful. These are made available so people can search for their ancestors and share their information with others. Some examples of these can be found at FamilySearch.org, Ancestry.com, RootsChat.com, RootsWeb.com and Genealogy.com.

Benefits

A good family history connects with young children. As young children generally enjoy hearing stories about their relatives, it can describe how couples met one another or why they took a job or took up a hobby. Countless children have been encouraged to take up a hobby or sport, do better in school or life in general, when told of a relative who did the same.

Strong families cherish their family history and when family members get together, they discuss and endlessly swap these stories. Unfortunately today, family members are often dispersed over a country or the globe, and keeping these stories becomes difficult. Other times, even if the extended family is centrally located, there is a central person, a grandmother/father, uncle/aunt, who is the central figure in keeping the family history (and hence) the extended family unit alive. When they pass away, if the history is not documented, the history of the family often times dies with them.

An effective family historical document does not need to be elaborate to be successful. It can be as simple as members of a family answering stock questions, keeping a family journal, the creation of a scrapbook that includes personal notes, or it can be as complicated as creating a time capsule.

Many public, private, and non profit organizations assist people in the creation and preservation of their families' history.

Gourt Home::Gourt :: Family history

Introduction

Motivation

The single family history

Conducting a Project

Benefits

See also