Genealogy and history

Some people put tremendous effort into extending and filling in their family trees.  In the end, what purpose does it serve?

Our chief consultant writes:

One of our consultants is a de facto genealogist.  It started years ago, when he made out a chart to keep his second cousins straight (there are a lot of them).  Soon he was the one people came to with questions, and sometimes with information; eventually his own curiosity took over.  Just organizing all the material at hand took most of his attention initially (he was lucky to have so much to work with), but eventually he dug into original records and visited some family-important places.

What good does it do?  He is long past the point of working out the relationship between a forest of living cousins.  There is no question of a title, or even a coat of arms, for which a known line of descent would have some identifiable value: his ancestors were not of the aristocracy.

And there is the fact that distant ancestors are, well, distant.  It is more probable than not that any particular one of your sixth-generation forefathers or foremothers passed on no genes at all to you, that your DNA all came from the others.  Why, then, should they matter?

There are reasons, both involved with the study of history.  Why and how anyone should study history is another question, one I won’t argue here.  Given that it is worthwhile, I think there are two related ways genealogy can contribute.

First, the people you find when tracing your family are (with rare exceptions) ordinary people, not the famous or outstanding individuals named in the history books.  You are made to realize that these are what make up nations or armies or the farmers of East Anglia.  Politicians are largely the froth on top of the waves, not the deep ocean currents.

Second, they are individuals.  One can study the statistics of history, exchange rates and tons of wheat grown and the like; they are useful for calculations.  But to understand a collective mass (like those farmers of East Anglia) it is immensely helpful to have an example, a face to put on the phrase, a particular name and village.  Then the events you find in the books take on a reality they did not have before.

As for visiting places, there is another similar reason, one I won’t attempt to explain or justify but only report.  Based on stories handed down in his family for generations, our consultant located a small town in Ireland from which an ancestor had emigrated to the US.  In one churchyard he found a tombstone with a familiar name: this person had written a letter to his grandfather a century before, a copy of which he had in his backpack.  “After all the stories and the drawing of charts, it was real,” he said.  “It was as if, pushing through some brambles in an English forest, I had found an old stone with the inscription, `Whosoever pulleth this sword from this stone is rightwise king of all England.'”

No titles, no coats of arms, just a certain. . . reality.