What is genealogy?
Genealogy is a branch of history that determines family relationships. The word genealogy is derived from the Greek “genea” meaning race or family and “logos” meaning discourse or study of. A genealogy is an account of the decent of a person or family from an ancestor or family progenitor. In a narrow sense genealogy is the study of individuals and their relationships to their family. In a broader sense it is a scientific study of individuals, their life story and how their stories are interwoven into the fabric of history. Family history is the basis of all history. Combining family histories creates the history of a community, combining community histories creates state histories and so on until national and world histories are created. History is about people and that is what genealogy is about.
Genealogy is the history of your family. Completing a family history is a process of arranging your family members in order by generations. It is often necessary for you to search for information by interviewing relatives, consulting family documents, visiting libraries and contacting county courthouses and churches. Researching your ancestors, and discovering the significant events of their lives, can be one of the most rewarding experiences of your life. How do I get started? Genealogy is not an expensive or difficult hobby to start. You need a pad of paper, some folders and a couple of pencils. The key to success is organization. Start keeping a folder with dividers for each family name you are researching. Lack of organization will make your search more confusing. Start with yourself (what you know) and work back in time (what you don’t know). Some people think that genealogy is only done in libraries, archives, and courthouses. Actually, one of the best places to go for informatio
Genealogy is the study of a family’s lineage. People might use genealogy to trace out their family trees, or simply to find a specific person in a family’s past and connect him or her to other members of that family. Genealogy is interested solely in who is in a family and who they are related to, as opposed to the more general study of family history, which might also track dates of birth and death, occupations held by family members, and other important facts about their lives and deaths. While some people, on occasion, refer to this larger field as genealogy, genealogy is better viewed as a subset of a greater discipline. Historically, genealogy was a very important field, because family connections between nobility were crucial to the idea of inheritance and the passing down of titles and rulership. In many societies, for example, if a king had no direct heir, the next closest heir would have to be found.
Abstract: This paper offers a theory of genealogy, explaining its rise in the nineteenth century, its epistemic commitments, its nature as critique, and its place in the work of Nietzsche and Foucault. The crux of the theory is recognition of genealogy as an expression of a radical historicism, rejecting both appeals to transcendental truths and principles of unity or progress in history, and embracing nominalism, contingency, and contestability. In this view, genealogies are committed to the truth of radical historicism and, perhaps more provisionally, the truth of their own empirical content. Similarly, genealogies operate as denaturalizing critiques of ideas and practices that hide the contingency of human life behind formal ahistorical or developmental perspectives.
