ROOTS & BRANCHES

I won’t try to mislead you: I’ve always been fascinated by lineage societies.

Even before I was a genealogist—and that’s talking a while ago since I started genealogy at age 24!—the cachet of groups such as the Daughters of the American Revolution definitely had some allure to me.

Then a couple of decades later when I began my first stint as executive director of the Genealogical Society of Pennsylvania, that group’s (now late) president was Herbert K. Zearfoss, who seemed to have insignia for virtually every lineage society in Philadelphia, which has always been a hotbed for them.

At Zearfoss’s insistence, I started getting into as many for which I qualified—everything from Society of Colonial Wars to Huguenot Society and War of 1812. They were good research challenges in some cases but after a few years the cachet wore off (and amount spent on annual dues wore me down!) so I let a lot of them lapse.

Still and all, I’ve remained interested in these groups (and even occasionally lecture about hem).

So it was a great deal of interest that I read Kimberly Ormsby Nagy’s The Complete Guide to Lineage Societies: The Who, What, Where, and How and found it to be a good introduction to such organizations.

Nagy’s a retired trauma surgeon who took to genealogy as a second career. Her guide reflects the breadth of her involvement (having joined some 80 organizations!) as well as her depth (she’s held a variety of posts).

The guide starts off by defining such societies and goes through all the points about how to get in them, as well as profiling what such societies do. There’s also an appendix listing many of the societies across the United States.

I’d gladly recommend this book to anyone considering joining a variety of such organizations since it gives you a good generic baseline against which to compare them.

I have just a few additional observations about the book:

• Nagy keeps harping on the need for ancestral “service” to qualify for organizations. While this is indeed true for many of them, especially ones that require military service, I think the word she was looking for was “distinction”—as in, what made the ancestor distinctive? (such as being a Huguenot, or a craftsman, or an enslaved person).
• Many of her otherwise helpful illustrations came out either light or muddy. Hopefully that can be corrected in future editions.
• Finally, in her list of societies—which she does say is not exhaustive—it’s surprising not to see one of the most esteemed, the Order of the Cincinnati—which requires an ancestor to have been a Revolutionary War officer (and not in just a state militia!) and for which there can be only one descendant admitted as a member at a time!

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 The Complete Guide to Lineage Societies: The Who, What, Where, and How by Kimberly Ormsby Nagy (Genealogical Publishing Company, Baltimore, MD: 2024, 80 pages)