Alan
E. Mann, AG
alan.familyhistory@gmail.com Accredited
Genealogist
BYU 2008 Computerized Genealogy conference www.alanmann.com/articles
Friday, 14 March 2008 9:45
am
Emphasizing the Family in
Family History: Putting Meat on the Bones
Too often, people “doing family history” focus on finding and documenting only their ancestry. Over 30 years ago, efforts to improve the image of genealogy resulted in renaming the Genealogy Library to the Family History Library. Despite these efforts, the old school approach of tracing ancestry to the exclusion of other aspects of family history is still present in the thinking of many who seek to research their family.
I would like to point out two other aspects of family history research
- Descendancy research extends our efforts to find the children and other descendants of our ancestors. This shifts the focus to descendants of siblings our ancestors instead of just the child through whom we are descended. There are two reasons to do our research this way:
- Siblings of our ancestors and their descendants are our relatives. They are our family. Uncles, aunts, nieces, nephews, and cousins are still family. The LDS are commanded to find and provide temple ordinances for their family. The concept of family in a religious context includes nieces, nephews, and cousins. There is also the concept of fathers as patriarchs. A patriarch presides over his children, grandchildren, etc. Thus, a patriarchal order is entirely based on descendancy, rather than ancestry. An LDS member’s responsibility extends to all family members, including cousins.
- Continuing our efforts to find descendants eventually brings us down through time to the present day, where we can end up finding living relatives. Those living relatives may know things we don’t know about the family. They may have memorabilia that has been passed down in the family from our common ancestor—such things as family bibles, stories, and old documents, certificates, or journals.
- Family history research is so named because it includes more than names, dates, and places. Gaining an understanding of events in the time and area where our family members lived helps us to understand them better and leads to clues which may guide our research to find more family members. The reasons for doing our family history are many, but should include
- coming to know and understand our family as well as finding the names and dates.
- coming to know the historical context of their lives, which aids in our research as well as making their story both more complete and more interesting.
- finding and including documents, stories, traditions, bibles, and journals to add interest and well as support for research conclusions
- LDS doctrine includes the concept of living with our family after death. In this context, family does include extended family. Getting to know our ancestors, their siblings, and the descendants of their siblings will assist in creating the bonds of love as well as creating the sealing links.
- doing medical and DNA research for both health history and confirmation of some of our research conclusions (NOTE, descendancy research greatly increases the reliability of medical conclusions and is necessary for DNA evidence).
Descendancy research looks for descendants. Ancestral research looks for ancestors. Even in my own interactions, I sometimes find myself saying researching your ancestors. I would suggest that when we doing genealogical research, we are looking for both ancestors and descendants. This leads me to attempt to change my habits and begin to refer to genealogical research in general as researching your family.
Adding photos, historical events, and stories makes what we have (our genealogy) more interesting to those who haven’t been bitten as hard by the family history bug. It makes what we have to share with relatives more likely to be read, and often leads to greater impact on those who do read it. If sharing is part of our purpose for doing what we do, then artifacts, stories, and historical context greatly enhance that sharing. The family in family history refers to our living family as well as the deceased. Because of the impact of privacy laws, we should include more information about the deceased family and reach out to living family through sharing.
This balance of this session is devoted to resources for adding historical context, finding living relatives, and enhancing the family in family history.
Biography
Biographies are often the repository of information to enhance family stories. We should search biography sites to find those which include our family. We should also consider putting what we have about our deceased family on biographical sites. Two such sites where you can search what’s there or leave your own arewww.biographicon.com and www.biographicalwiki.com.
Geography
The major types of geographical information for genealogists
are maps, gazetteers, and local histories. It is often a good idea to include a
map and some brief information from a gazetteer in your shared family history. A gazetteer
is a dictionary of place names. The usual purpose is to look up the name of a
place we find in researching our ancestors and learn more about the place and
where it is located. This is a step we may need to do before locating a map.
There are many gazetteers available online. Some of them are searchable. For
example, see the gazetteer of
NOTE: even an alphabetical gazetteer on the Internet is at least partially searchable. You load the page listing the places and use <CTRL-F> to find the place you want.
Maps are very useful and are widely available on the Internet. There are single maps, collections of single maps, and collections of similar maps (usually called an atlas) Pay attention to time period, scale, and legends of maps before using them in a family history.
With Google Maps, a new application for maps became available. Because Google makes its maps available to developers, programmers can build their maps into their computer programs. One such example is www.familytreemapper.com, which maps new FamilySearch data.
Issues in deciding which map to see include time period (modern, historical, etc.), scale, and type. Maps can be demographic (shows statistical information), topographical (shows terrain), street (shows streets in a town), or special. One type of special map is the census surname distribution maps at http://www.hamrick.com/names/index.html.
Here are some map resource sites:
Perry-Castańeda
Library Map Collection in
John R. Borchert Map Library in
Goldbug’s SiteFinder (www.goldbug.com/map/sitefinder.html)
Animap online - http://genealogyinc.com/map_county.html
Atlas of the German Reichs - http://www.library.wisc.edu/etext/ravenstein/
GenMapUK (www.archersoftware.co.uk/genmap01.htm)
Links to maps and geography resources - http://jrshelby.com/hcl/ (see state list)
History
Learn about the history of the area your ancestors lived in during the time period they were there (and the periods just before and after). Consider looking for ethnic and political histories as well as local and national events. While there are many resources under History, many will be found under place (country, state, province, county, or even town), and some under "military" or "wars." For example, you might find a history about the 1860's under History, you might find one under the county where your ancestors lived, or it might be under U.S. Military or the Civil War. Be flexible. When trying to learn about the historical setting of your ancestors and the records concerning them, look several different ways -- by place, topic, and record type.
A great source of historical context is published county
histories. There is currently an effort to digitize and publish county
histories at the BYU Family History Archive (http://www.lib.byu.edu/fhc/),
which now includes efforts to scan books held at the Allen County Library in
Cyndi's List is best for U.S. History with many subcategories. Be careful to check all possible categories in Cyndi's List. For example, the Civil War category has over 20 subcategories.
Some major starting points (see Summary) include:
History Channel - http://www.historychannel.com/
HistorySeek has recently added a genealogy section - http://www.historyseek.com/
HyperHistory - http://www.hyperhistory.com/
Medieval times - http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/sbook.html.
Timelines
As you research the lives of your ancestors you may become too focused on finding dates and locations for events, and forget about the big picture -- world and local events, local conditions, and surroundings which probably had some impact on your deceased family members. Timelines can come to the rescue. Timelines serve to remind us of what events happened in the context of a person's life. You can compare events in the life of the ancestor with a historical timeline of events, compare the ancestor with another ancestor, figure out who may have moved due to major events (various Gold Rushes, battles, border changes, natural disasters, etc.), which ancestor was old enough (or too old) to participate in events such as wars, and so on.
Creating a timeline shows researchers not only what events may have influenced their ancestor's lives, but also potential research paths, and what resources were or weren’t available. A good timeline will include boundary changes, county creations, and which resources may or may not have been available in that time period.
Most genealogists will include a timeline to provide direction and focus to research. That is, a timeline should be part of the proper research process routine. You can create a timeline yourself in a text editor or word processor, use an online timeline tool, purchase a timeline program like GeneLines, or you can use the timeline function of many genealogy programs to create a timeline based on your entered data. Timelines can be strictly a list of historical events, a list of events in the lives of your family, or a combination of the two.
For help with timelines, see these resources: http://cascoly.com/history.htm, www.ourtimelines.com, www.progenysoftware.com/brands/genealogy_genelines.php, www.timelinemaker.com
For examples, see:
Modernism Timeline, 1890-1940 (http://faculty.washington.edu/eckman/timeline.html), Hispanic Timeline (http://www.neta.com/~1stbooks/0fchron.htm),
Medieval Timeline (www.renfaire.com/History/timeline.html),
Holy Roman Empire Timeline (http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/t-hre.htm),
Muslim World Timeline (http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/t-islam.htm),
100 Year War Timeline (http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/t-100yea.htm),
European Religious Reformation Timeline (http://courses.wcupa.edu/jones/his101/t-reform.htm), U.S. History Timeline (www.serve.com/ushistory/timelin4.htm)
US Civil War Timeline/Map http://theweb.badm.sc.edu/701fstu/williams/TIMELINE.HTM) and (http://californiacentralcoast.com/commun/map/civil/tl/timeline.html),
Personal Timeline form www.kbyu.byu.edu/ancestors/teachersguide/tg-images/timeform.gif,
Historiograph chart (timeline) for purchase (http://www.genealogy.org/~ngs/showcase.html), Genealogy Timeline (www.execpc.com/~laurag/genealogytimeline.html)
For information on finding living relatives, see the syllabus material for Kory Meyerink’s class at 1:45 on Saturday and Lorinda Mann’s at 3:00 on Saturday.