Questions about genealogy
What is the point of building your family tree?
For me and for most people who do it, I suspect that it's just for fun like any other hobby. There may be some people who have a serious purpose, but I think that they would be few in number compared to those who do it for fun.
What are you trying to prove?
I'm guessing here, but those with a serious purpose may be trying to do one of the following.
- Prove their relationship to a deceased person whose will needs clarification, or something like that.
- Use genealogy as one aspect of social history studies. In isolation, genealogy won't be likely to prove anything, but I can imagine that it might be useful in conjunction with other types of research.
The rest of us who just do it for fun, may do one or more of the following.
- See how many names we can accumulate. While it may be necessary to accumulate a lot of ancestors to find enough interesting ones, I don't see it as an end in itself, but apparently some people do.
- Identify celebrity distant relatives. I find this to be an interesting sideline, as this blog shows.
- Learn how our specific ancestors lived. Some of my ancestors are discussed in history books. Others are harder to research, but my father did some of that research.
- Learn about history generally in a different way. As somebody else noted, recent history tends to be covered in more detail than older history, and the further back you go, the less detail you normally get. Using genealogy as a base makes it more interesting to take history in generational units.
- Study our local area in ways we might not otherwise have done. However, my ancestors for the last 5 or 6 generations all lived in an area that is not local to me, and never was except for a few months when I was 5 years old. While I like visiting Montrose periodically to see some of my relatives, I can't really envisage living there, which would be the only way to study it properly. If my parents had remained in the area all their lives, it might be different. Some of my medieval ancestors lived in what is now my local area, so I might eventually visit some of their homes that are open to the public, but it doesn't offer the same opportunities for me as North East Scotland would.
If anybody can tell me other reasons to add to either of the above lists, I'll add them providing I regard them as credible.
Are you implying that you are superior or something?
Some people may be, but I'm certainly not. Firstly, I think everybody of European stock descends from European royalty. (I can't speak for people of other stock because I don't have any information, but my guess is they might well descend from royalty of whatever stock they come from too.) Secondly, I'm not a fan of royalty and studying my ancestors has only served to remind me that some royals were positively evil. At their worst, they were the equivalent in their day of Osama Bin Laden, Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler. Of course there were good kings too, but taken overall, it would be hard to say that they were better than the people they ruled over.
I've read about how snobbish some people can be about their ancestors, and I've also seen comments about how we shouldn't be proud of our ancestors because they are a mix of good and bad. As the previous paragraph shows, I recognize the good and bad but I can still feel pride that I descend from some specific ancestors, and correspondingly feel disappointment or even shame that I descend from others. Thus far, I have not found a definite descent from William Wallace to me, but I would be proud to find one. Is that sad? Maybe, but I suspect that I am not alone in having such silly objectives. I'm certainly not going to spend a lot of time trying to prove that I descend from William Wallace or any other specific ancestors, because that would be the road to frustration if I don't find what I'm looking for. Actually, I eventually found a possible descent when I was looking for connections to another family, but there is a paternity question that needs clarifying.
So .... how would I regard myself as being superior, knowing that I have many evil people among my ancestors? I don't, but being part of the extended royal family tree certainly makes it easier to get into genealogy. As noted elsewhere, I've actually found a use for royalty :-)
Are you an expert on genealogy?
No. I am a mere novice in this subject, although I am a quick learner. I will, of course, update and expand this page as I learn more. Even in those subjects in which I consider myself an expert, there are always things to learn. Here, I have much more to learn.
Who is an ancestor?
My first thought was that this is a stupid question. It's not, because some people widen the definition (wrongly) to suit their own purposes. So here goes.
An ancestor is somebody who is related by a series of child-parent connections and nothing else. Brothers, sisters, uncles, aunts, husbands, wives, partners and cousins do not count. That means (for example) that if your grandmother had two husbands, only one of those husbands is your ancestor, unless her second husband happened to be another ancestor of yours, which is possible but most unlikely. Except in that unlikely situation, the other may be your step-grandfather, but he is not your ancestor. When it comes to more distant ancestors, it is possible that somebody has multiple partners, and that you descend from each of them (and there are many such cases in my ancestry), but the immediate descendants will be different for each partner.
Who is a descendant?
Anybody who can claim the person concerned as an ancestor as defined above, now or in the future. I will never be an ancestor of anybody, therefore I will have no descendants, unless I father a child before I die. I know that men have fathered children in their seventies and maybe occasionally older than that, but it's not a prospect that appeals to me. It never has done because I learned early on that family life didn't suit me. So in generations to come, I may show up in charts as the brother or son of somebody's ancestor, but that's as close as they will get.
As if to prove that people often get these definitions wrong, I was listening to a radio discussion about the attempt to find the body of King Richard III, when they linked to somebody in Canada. He was described as a direct descendant of the king, but he actually descends from Richard's sister, Anne of York. As far as I know, the king has no descendants alive today.
Who is a relative?
Since everybody on Planet Earth is somehow related, if only we could prove it, one might argue that everybody is a relative of everybody else, with ancestors and descendants being special categories of relatives. Given all that, everybody can define relatives however they want and it's difficult to argue that they are wrong. For what it's worth, I have two definitions - one for real life (close) relatives, and one for genealogical (distant) relatives. Please remember that these are my personal definitions, and that I am not trying to impose them on anybody else. If you disagree with them, it emphasises the point that any definition of Who is a relative? is a matter of opinion, although an ancestor has a fixed definition.
Real life (close) relatives - my personal definition
In real life, I decided early on in life to impose a count of 4 limit to anybody who I would regard as a relative. The count works on how many steps up or down a family tree I have to go to make a connection, ignoring marriages. Parents count 1, siblings and grandparents count 2, nieces, nephews, aunts and uncles count 3, while cousins, great-nieces, great-nephews and great-aunts count 4. None of my great-grandparents, great-uncles or great-great-grandparents lived long enough for me to know them, but they all count 3 or 4. In-laws count the same as their spouse for as long as they are together. This system means that if a cousin has children, I do not count them as a relative, but it has no bearing on whether I like or get on with them or not. I simply explain that we have to draw the boundary somewhere, and a cousin's children count 5 on my scale. Children of cousins are the only people I have met who I don't count as a relative in real life, but who have a legitimate claim to be considered as a relative. I have never met any second cousins (who would count 6 on my scale) and wouldn't even be able to name them. Such a system clearly doesn't make sense when discussing genealogy. For a start, most of my ancestors wouldn't count as relatives at all.
Genealogical (distant) relatives - my personal definition
Fortunately, the phrase distant relative provides a convenient distinction to seperate people who I am somehow related to but who fall outside the count of 4 limit, but here, too, I impose limits. Firstly, I only count people as distant relatives if the person is my ancestor, or if I can identify a line of descent from one of my ancestors to the person concerned. Secondly, I do not count spouses or partners. It is necessary for me to find a common ancestor via another line of descent.
This creates an obvious anomaly because those people who are only my aunts and uncles by marriage rather than by being daughters and sons of my grandparents do not count as distant relatives although they are close relatives. My reasoning is that a couple I sometimes meet personally are treated as one, which makes them a special case.
At this stage, I have not attempted to research the ancestry of those people who are only my aunts and uncles by marriage, and I don't know of anybody else who has either, but it might be a challenge to prove that I share common ancestors with them. One such uncle has the rare Tavendale surname, so he would be the obvious one to start with even though Tavendale (or any variation such as Tevendale) has never shown up in any family tree that I've seen featuring my own ancestors. Just now, I have other priorities but I can always change those. Another potentially intriguing case is Mr Butler, who married one of my nieces. I have Butler ancestors, and while Butler is a much more common name than Tavendale, I suspect that my niece's husband shares some of those Butler ancestors, but again, I have no plans to investigate.
Can you explain the different cousin and other terms?
I'm not sure I've got this right in all details, but I've read a book in which somebody discussed half-cousins, and I had to check their family tree to discover that they actually meant second cousins. So here goes.
First cousins are the ones that most of us know about, and are normally just called cousins. They normally share two grandparents. It may be that first cousins who only share one grandparent, because that grandparent had more than one partner, count as half-cousins, but I can't answer that. This in any case was not the situation referred to in the previous paragraph. Henceforth, I'll ignore the added complication of the nearest common ancestor having different partners, at least until I identify the correct terminology.
Your second cousins are the children of your parents' first cousins. Your third cousins are the grandchildren of your grandparents' first cousins, and so on.
All of which sounds straightforward, except that the further back you go, the more likely you are to come across in-breeding. In some families, this may not be very far back at all. There was a time when it was common for people to marry their first or second cousins, but this is much rarer these days.
There is another complication if you try to establish the relationship between two people who can both trace their family history back to the same couple, but the number of generations is not the same for each of them. In these cases, work out the cousin relationship based on the shorter line of descent, then count how many extra generations the longer descent is removed from that. For example, you are the first cousin once removed of your father's cousin, and you are your first cousin twice removed from your grandmother's cousin. Those are simple examples, but you can work out your cousin relationship with any historical figure, providing you can establish a common ancestor with them.
I descend from two of Macbeth's grandparents, therefore I also descend from a first cousin of his. To use the correct terminology, I had to count how many generations it took to descend from that first cousin to me. This would be tedious to get right, because there are many different descents to me from that first cousin (and if I descend from more than one of Macbeth's first cousins, I'd have to check all the possible descents). On the only line I checked, I am Macbeth's first cousin 33 times removed. Many relationships are even trickier to work out, because there can be long lines of descent to count on both sides. In my pages about common ancestors with distant relatives, I deliberately avoid calculating "10th cousin, 20 times removed" or whatever, because it's both time-consuming and difficult for a lot of people to understand. By naming the ancestors and their birth dates, people can get a fair idea of just how distant the relationship is anyway, taking into account when the other person was born.
But what about Macbeth's mother Donada? As I descend from her sister, there is no cousin relationship. Being 33 generations further down the line from Donada's nephew, I could call her my great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-great-aunt, but apart from repeating great 33 times being difficult for the writer, it's also unreadable when there are that many involved, so genealogists use numbers instead. Donada is therefore my 33rd great-aunt, while her parents are my 33rd great-grandparents. In the event that other lines of descent involve fewer generations, those numbers may drop slightly, but not by much.
Concluding thoughts
Even though building a family tree can be complicated in itself, genealogy would be quite boring to most people if that were all there was to it. A few people are apparently happy just collecting names, but I'm not one of them. Building up a collection of names only becomes interesting to most of us if we can learn about some of those people. Some people have left little or no legacy beyond their descendants, but they may provide a vital link in the descent from an interesting ancestor. As long as we can find enough interesting people among our ancestors, that can sustain our interest. To that end, it is easier if we can identify a link to the royal family tree, even though we may not like the royal family, because we are thereby automatically linked to a lot of people who we can read about in history books or on the internet. It is also nice to find connections to other historical celebrities such as poets, authors, painters, explorers, scientists and inventors. As my other pages show, I have plenty of political distant relatives, but it seems that those are easier to find that most historical figures.
Ancestors don't have to be important enough to feature in history books to be interesting. My father found plenty to interest him in researching more recent, very humble ancestors, mainly from the 18th and 19th centuries. He was able to get a lot of information from schools, libraries and other places, not forgetting family hearsay handed down from previous generations about these people. Information about specific humble people, even from the 19th century, has mostly been lost forever. The further back in time we go, the less we find.
We may also learn that some of our ancestors had interesting relatives who are not our own ancestors. For example, one of my ancestors is the sister-in-law of the poet Geoffrey Chaucer, who I don't count as a distant relative because I don't have enough information to identify a common ancestor, and I don't think he is my ancestor either. Another poet, Robert Burns, is the grandson of a couple who are also my ancestors. As pointed out elsewhere in this blog, I have plenty of other connections to famous people, some of whom really are my ancestors. I have become more interested in the lives of some of these people as a result of identifying a genealogical connection with them. That doesn't mean I like these people, although I like some of them, but they seem more interesting when they are my ancestors or they are connected to my ancestors.
Some of my ancestors went to war against each other, but a few generations later, their descendants sometimes married each other. Sometimes such marriages were arranged by people who knew exactly what they were doing.
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