Is the goal of creating a family tree worthwhile? What does it tell us about our ancestors?
Is this pursuit actually holding back a genuine quest for historical knowledge?
Someone new to genealogy would be forgiven for thinking that
genealogy is all about family trees, i.e. some depiction of our
biological lineage (including pedigree charts, fan charts, etc.). I know
through experience that there are newcomers who believe these terms synonymous
and that a family tree is what they should be asking for. Digging below the
surface, however, reveals that they actually want more but they do not know
what to call it, or what form it might take. This may be difficult to accept
for those professionals reading this. Sometimes, over-familiarity with a
subject means that you do not see it the way that others, outside of your circle,
do.
I want to make a case that the focus on biological lineage
in many quarters is actually bad for genealogy, and that it is limiting the
online tools and the software products that we are offered. It may also
contribute to the denigration of genealogy by some academic historians.
The term family tree is ubiquitous but it is not correct
from a mathematical perspective. Even if every family was a nice neat nuclear family then
eventually, in some remote generation, we would find that a common ancestor
contributed to several lines of lineage. This effect is called Pedigree Collapse.
However, we also know that families are more complex than nuclear ones, and together
this means that successive generations cannot be represented accurately using a
mathematically-correct tree. If we
consider relationship types other than biological ones then the representation
is not even close to a tree.
So, let’s assume that someone produces a family tree. Maybe
they researched it themselves, or maybe they hired someone, or maybe they just
took one of the online trees at face value without checking it. Then what? What
does it tell them about their ancestors? I have seen too many family trees that
focus solely on the surname shared by the person creating it, as though
surnames are somehow significant from a genetic point of view. What about all
their other ancestors; those whose surname was different? OK, they can print
off some huge chart (software and printer permitting) that they can use to
wallpaper their bathroom. But what about those odd people who collect trees and
stick them together, often resulting in hundreds of thousands of individuals –
and sometimes well over a million. What use is such a philatelic pursuit to
them, other than being able to wallpaper their whole house, and most of their
street too?
If those people look deeply at some of the dates in their
trees then they may see a glimmer of something else. For instance, a child’s
death on Christmas Day! There’s a story there – a very sad one in this case.
That ‘something else’ is what we call family history. It is hardly surprising
that the term family history is often held as a more precise description of our
pursuit, particularly in the face of a literal interpretation of the term genealogy.
For instance, a typical dictionary definition of genealogy[1]
is: a record or table of the descent of a
person, family, or group from an ancestor or ancestors; a family tree.
Most people who have spent time doing their own research
will want to find any and all available information relating to the history of
their family. Even if they began with the goal of a family tree, they would
quickly have grasped the importance of the extra details from census returns
such as occupations, or the fact that a family were neighbours of other family
members, or even of future spouses. Building up a picture of their lives, as
best we can, tells us much about how we got here, and is something we rightly
want to preserve and pass on to our descendants.
We now see many Web sites encouraging people to collaborate
on recent local history, including our houses, streets, towns/villages,
photographs, personal recollections and personal histories. This is adding our
own contributions to that growing collection of family history, and ensuring
that our lives are not forgotten. I want to pass on an image of my childhood to
my own children but, due to the sometimes over-zealous slum clearance projects
of the 1960’s and 1970’s in England, virtually none of the places where I, or
my parents or grandparents, lived exist now. I therefore spend as much time
researching local places as I do my ancestors. Is this desire to include our
own history a new phenomenon?
No, it’s actually following an ancient tradition of oral
family-lore and folklore – the telling and re-telling of stories to our family and
community members. Although we still tell stories of our past to our children,
we now have many alternative media forms including photographs, home movies,
letters and other personal documents, official documents, and now digital
family history data.
Isn’t it a shame, then, that so much of the supporting
software for genealogy is still focused on the concept of a family tree rather
than family history? I have recently written about the impact of this on online
tools at Collaboration
With Tears and later at Collaboration
Without Tears, but similar limitations may be found in the software tools
that we purchase for our home computers. I expect that some vendors – if they
read my blogs posts, of course – will be preparing to counter this and indicate
how they support attachments such as photographs, video, and document scans,
and how they can represent events in peoples’ lives. Even with products that
support full event-based histories, though, the primary presentation interface
relies on a family tree. When it comes to generating a timeline, the fact that
it was a secondary consideration betrays itself when you find that not
everything can be placed on the timeline (e.g. those attachments mentioned
above). Where is the support for recording narrative, both for recollections
and for transcribed evidence? And what the heck happened to citations?
Sources and citations is such an important subject that I
plan to cover it at a later date. I mention it because it is a demonstrable
disaster from the point of view of software. It spills over from genealogy into
other fields but there are so many entrenched attitudes and so little
co-operation that it makes them onerous to use and impossible to share
reliably.
Part of the reason for the software limitations might be
blamed on the GEDCOM data format. This format is rather old by anyone’s
standards, and it was primarily designed to represent family trees. Although it
is still successfully used to transfer family trees between people and between
products, it falls down badly when you try to transfer data beyond that limited
tree concept. As I describe under Commercial
Realities of Data Standards, the design of existing software products have
been strongly influenced by the concepts within GEDCOM, and by the need to
retain some compatibility with it.
The answer to the poser of the title question may be
obvious, but what about the industry? Genealogy is about history rather than
just lineage. This fact needs to be better communicated to new or non-genealogists,
and better embraced by our software tools. We also need modern data standards
that support this greater scope. Change is inevitable but how much better if it
came from within rather than from “without”.
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