ROOTS & BRANCHES

There was a time—a time that doesn’t seem like it was too awfully long ago, reality to the contrary!—when I inevitably was the youngest person in a roomful of genealogists in a meeting or at a conference.

Starting hardcore family history at age 24 will do that to you. Because while I’m far from the person who got the youngest start, a consistent thing in my 35 years-plus of doing this is that many more retired people take it up.

I was thinking of the adage “the more things change, the more they stay the same” in beginning to write this column and decided that wasn’t quite the case.

Because genealogy from the vantage point of 2021 does look very different than it did in 1984 when I started.

Much of that difference comes from the changes in communication and accessibility to records fostered by the Internet.

But the principles in many ways remain consistent.

We used to call communications “placing a query,” often in a publication appearing quarterly or even annually and then waiting for the slow drip of a response. Now we send an email or text and might get an immediate response.

Remember getting “microfilm-reader elbow” from scrolling the old hand-crank readers when wanted to look at the U.S. Census, maybe helped by published indexes? Now, of course, the publicly available censuses are all digitized and computer searchable.

Tombstones and cemeteries have always been a mainstay of research as well as adding to the atmosphere of genealogy. Now many of us do less “fieldwork” but we still use these “cities of the dead”—often now through the online site Find A Grave.

The number of genealogy institutes is one aspect that has expanded beyond parallel. There has been a great increase in such education targeting both amateur and professional family historians, to the benefit of both.

And, importantly, people started family history back then for many different reasons—piercing the veil of the unknown, lineage society membership, ability to casually name-drop famous ancestors, scholarly pursuits, etc.—and that variety is still the case.

Except now they often pierce that veil by using DNA and genetic genealogy processes.

Lineage societies are more open to sophisticated proof arguments and less based on social connections.

Some people still want to believe descent from a famous ancestor brings a special cache (Others are more impressed with their ancestry’s commonness … loads of people seem to like to have ancestry that stems from indentured servants).

A substantial segment of family historians look at genealogical writing as a special craft plied at its best in journals.

So, to my mind, things haven’t stayed the “same,” but there are mostly “parallels” between then and now.