Categories: Genealogy

Genealogy, family history, history, ancestry, and roots, are all terms that more or less act as synonyms in English … at least in the United States.

They’re not synonyms, though, and knowing what each term is, and does, is crucial in saving you time, money, and stress.

Below are tips that will help guide you.

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SETTING A GOAL
Determine what you want.

• Do you simply want an illustrated tree with names of you, your parents, grandparents, and great-grandparents (4 generations)? Do you want more than 4 generations … if yes, how many? As far as can be documented?
• Do you want an illustrated tree, with the info above, that will include years of birth and death of each, plus locations for both of those vitals?
• Do you only want to know the birthplace, ethnicity, or nationality of only one or a few ancestors, instead of an illustration of all ancestors within a certain number of generations?
• Do you want to know more about one particular ancestor who you’ve heard so much about, whose life you want to showcase at an event, or include in a future publication (e.g. dissertation, thesis, novel, article)?
• Do you want to learn about the lives of your ancestors in their community, to understand why they married who they did, why they lived in a certain community, which social or political organizations they were members of, where they worshiped religiously if anywhere, what their occupations were, if they attended school, if they spoke a language other than English? In other words, the fullest picture possible, in historical context, on the lives of those ancestors?

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FAMILY HISTORY

If you answered yes to the first two white bullet points above, then you are interested in family history.  Family history primarily focuses on the names and vitals of recent forebears, and is most commonly used at family reunions on t-shirts and in books.

I offer a service providing deluxe family trees designed by me. You can view the options by clicking here .

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GENEALOGY

If you answered yes to the third through fifth white bullet points above, you want genealogy. But you now need to decide on a few things:

• First, do you want to substantiate family oral tradition of descending from people of certain ethnic groups, or from certain nations (e.g. that you’ve Wolof, German, or Syrian ancestors)?
• Or, are you interested in knowing the birthplace of all of your forebears within the last however-many generations?
• Second, do you want copies of original civil and parochial records for the ancestor(s) you want to focus on?
• Third, is this to facilitate litigation concerning property inherited?
• Fourth, what is your budget? Are you looking for pro bono research?
• Where in the world did these individuals live and when?
• What religion (and denomination of christianity) were they?

As you can see, genealogy is the more academic, rigorously researched and documented side of Family History, an evidentiary discipline. Genealogists, like historians, rely mostly on paper trails to study patterns in order to positively identify people, their lives, and the social, political, and economic world in which they lived. Context is everything in genealogy and history. If the genealogist does not have research on the individuals, or branches, they will spend many, many hours going to various repositories in person, and looking for material online. By its nature, it is very tedious and time-consuming. Each fact about individual ancestors, or branches of them, that you would like documented, will come with full citations for information used to come to conclusions.

Because of the rigor, you need to prepare a budget to remunerate the genealogist, which will include salary, gas, parking, xeroxing or digitization of records, and postal mailing to you or to the genealogist. Genealogists rarely do this work pro bono. Sometimes genealogists will offer you a flat rate fee, and usually this is when they already have research on the individuals you’re keen to document, or they know the individuals or branches, and where to get the records needed. This is especially true if the genealogist is a specialist of a particular community, ethnic group, or region of a country.

Often, though, the genealogist will not have the information available, but will be happy to take the research on. They will charge you an hourly rate and will likely not be inclined to charge you a flat rate, simply because he/she will not know how much time and labor the project will take.

Have a consultation with the genealogist before any research begins. During the consultation, you will need to state clear goals or one clear goal, and what your budget is. From that, the researcher will have an idea of the scope of the project, whether or not he/she has a lot of information already for the project, or if he/she will have to do research from scratch. This would be a good time to discuss a payment plan, sign any disclosures or contracts.

I offer genealogy and deluxe family history reports, in narrative form, on families I have researched over the last 20 years. Each report contains names, vitals, occupations, locations of residence, and other minor biographical information, all researched and cited. You can view those reports by clicking here. At present, my database contains reports on about 100 families, containing thousands of entries on people from the Louisiana Creole, Houma and Chitimacha community.

This article is an example of how genealogy narratives may look.

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KNOW THE LIMITATIONS

1. You will never be able to document or know info on all of your ancestors. In four generations (you through your great-grandparents), we each have 15 people. In eight generations, we have 255 people. In ten generations, we have 1,023 people. That number keeps growing to thousands and thousands and thousands.
2. Your ancestry does not begin 4-8 generations ago, nor does it begin when branches of your family established deep roots in a certain location. It goes back to the beginning of humanity. You descend from all of those people equally, and it is impossible to quantify all of them, and also impossible to quantify ethnicities of your ancestors in you. Quantifying ethnicity is biologically and socially meaningless, even if people often refer to themselves as “half” this, or “one quarter” that.
3. In Europe and the Americas, the closer we get to the Middle Ages (up to, say, the 15^th century), the paper trail begins to run dry … very dry. This does not necessarily mean that “no records exist” for certain ancestors. Sometimes, the records of these ancestors are held in nations that we don’t know about. Other times, the records are in fragile condition, with fading, tears, or ink bleeds. We often find that some national archives, or organizations, who have the records you need, have not digitized or indexed them, so a simple Google search yields nothing.

   Of course, before the 15^th century, in the West, records have been lost or destroyed over time.

   From the 15^th century onward, in the U.S., there are records for your ancestor(s) somewhere. The task is finding them. Sometimes they find us, too. There may not be many, but one is better than none.

4. It is impossible to know the vitals, birth and death places, identities, or phenotypes of all of your ancestors. You will also never find pictures of all of them, probably uncommon to find images or paintings of all in the last 5 generations, also.
5. DNA tests do not tell you “your roots.” Roots are socially constructed, as are identities and cultures practiced. DNA is a biological reality and does not carry social constructs. Humans attribute social constructs to biology (e.g. “black people are better at sports and manual labor because of their DNA” “I’m a quadroon – 1/4th black”). DNA companies compare frequencies in mutations/markers in your DNA only with other people in their databases. Their databases represent less than 1% of all living humans, and tend to be dominated by people in the United States, the United Kingdom, and some central European countries. Africans, Asians, and Native Americans represent less than 1% of DNA they have in their databases. Based on the identities of people in their databases, their location of residence, and some scant info they provide to the companies, each DNA test service sends you a “certificate of ancestry,” or show you a percentage of that on their website. Because all humans are “mixed,” with ancestors from all over the world, DNA tests will always be skewed towards the majority population samples in DNA companies’ databases. If you are Latin, Arab, Persian, Chinese, Filipino, Bambara, or Chitimacha, your DNA comparison will make no biological or mathematical sense with any DNA company anywhere on earth.
6. Those percentages are only based on identities of people in their database. Their database will never contain DNA from all living humans, and likewise from deceased humans. The DNA used in those services are usually autosomal, and autosomal DNA, unlike mitochondrialDNA (maternally inherited only) and yDNA (paternally inherited only, and women do not have yDNA), is recombinant. In other words, autosomal DNA shuffles randomly with each conception. This means that two full siblings will receive slightly different results, and also different DNA cousins in the database of the company. It’s not because one of your parents was unfaithful. It’s the known nature of autosomal DNA in science.
7. You should be wary of family trees posted online on websites. You should be way of the ones on Ancestry.com also, because the website does not check the accuracy of entries in members’ trees. Even if Ancestry.com and FamilySearch.org offer the benefit of linking primary sources (documents) to individuals in a member’s tree, those two websites do not verify the accuracy of those linkages. It means that online trees are fraught with issues. The only way to know what is wrong or right on these online trees, is by conducting genealogical research yourself, or by hiring someone to do it for you. Do not fall prey to laziness or to blind trust in online trees. Always be skeptical of their contents, and always find a way to verify the accuracy of the information in them.

– Christophe Landry