Science shows us all people living today share the
same genetic markers with the world’s earliest known ancestors. In
simple terms, if we go back far enough in time we’ll find we all
share a common ancestor. To make this statement, science used
genetics, and when genetics is applied to building family lines for genealogy, it
opens a new way to develop our family lineage connections and to
validate connections made through paper records.
Genetics is becoming a new genealogical tool, because historically genealogy only focused on developing
lineage trails through the use of vital records, family documents,
published information and family stories. That approach worked in
many situations, but paper records have a lot of problems. Not
the least of which is paper’s ability to survive
the years from a document’s creation to the time it is located,
assuming the researcher even knows where to look the documents.
Paper trails are also limited by the accuracy of the person doing
the recording and the accuracy of the information being recorded. Family stories don’t survive time well because they mutate as the
storyteller’s memory ages, and all too often the story is lost when
the last storyteller leaves us.
Our genealogical journey began with two goals in
mind. First, was a need to understand our family’s medical pedigree so
history could inform us about any genetic predispositions to
illness. Our second goal was to learn about our heritage and
our ancestor's migration paths in an attempt to understand more about our
family’s history and culture. Finding relations, and the places
where we came from is the goal of most people doing genealogical
research. For most of us the search begins with familial knowledge
imparted by our relatives through word-of-mouth or family
documents.
In our case we began looking at the city clerk’s
office where we grew up. In there we began collecting the records
of people we knew were in our family and in their families. Those
documents pointed us to new places to search for more records. Each
new document almost always gave us new clues to more records, which
clued us to even more records and locations. Over time our
recursive record-collecting process generated an enormous pile of
paper that grew and morphed into the large online database you see
on this web site.
Finding recent vital records is not much of a challenge for genealogist,
but finding records reasonably accurate and with complete
information is a significant issue when looking back in time. Today, finding recent records
is much better than it was just a few years ago, and the records of
a few years ago are much better than records created in an earlier
time, but as we move back in time the quality and survivability of
records diminishes rapidly. Still, with record keeping and its
accuracy improving as we go forward, our children and their children
will find the search for family and medical information easier than
we found the experience, but this record keeping improvement process isn’t doing
much good for the records of years gone past.
On a positive note, our country's
FOIA (Freedom of
Information Act) has made the records of long ago more exposed as they are being cataloged into effective
databases so that simple name searches are now helping us locate
records in places we would have never known to look. Hampering the
quality of the records is the unpredictable level of literacy
and accuracy of the people involved in giving and recording information. This
is further hampered by colloquial accents and phrases, and in many
cases inaccurate family information makes its way into the records
in all time periods.
Stored documents also are at the mercy of the paper
and ink’s useful lifecycle. In far too many case paper crumbles
or the ink fades below being visible. Weather, fires and natural
or civil disasters can have a devastating affect on the
survivability of old documents. In our search for family members we
are approaching the paper trail horizon for some family tree branches for
many of these reasons our ability to extend branch is being halted, unless some of
the missing information is found hidden in undiscovered places.
While document survivability is a time problem that
will only get worse for older records, the historical process of
using surnames to identify people doesn’t go back much past the
beginning of the second millennium. Even during the time since
then, surnames given to people may not be those of the parent if the
child was adopted, changed clans, places or was conceived outside of
the surname’s identity.
Good
information about how surnames were conceived and applied is
available in these three links where surnames were studied:
