ROOTS & BRANCHES

What a trip down memory lane this summer of “Roots & Branches” columns has been!

For those who haven’t been reading the series every week, I’ve been reflecting back on the first time I taught a genealogy class – a continuing education course for the Lebanon Campus of Harrisburg Area Community College in 1991.

This was a genealogy world without the Internet or DNA. Obviously, I could not predict the future, so the fact that the impact of those technologies wasn’t in my course just “is what it is.”

Along with that would come a reordering of genealogical searches. Suggesting to someone that their first move would be to analyze “what they know or think they know” is still valid.

But making the next step a full evaluation of “home sources” – family Bibles, military discharges, other papers “in the attic” – might still be a methodical approach with much to recommend itself; however, I can only laugh at the thought that many genealogists today would put that before investigating sources such as FamilySearch.org or getting a trial to Ancestry.com.

And while I wish that more people would still put stock in visiting libraries (or critically looking at their online collections) and courthouses as well as researching documents (rather than just doing database searches), it’s a losing battle with many new genealogists.

I also realize that I underemphasized the U.S. Census and took an unconscious but pernicious Euro-centric slant with my curriculum. I haven’t taught continuing ed courses in a long time but I would obvious correct these defects if I ever did again.

As I’ve said on a number of occasions, I’m still a Gutenberg man in many ways – loving the printed word and printed or handwritten paper documents … they have a sensory appeal of “warmth” to me that the “cold” words of database information lack.

But when it comes to leveraging DNA matches – when put together with family trees compiled from documents – I’m grateful for the march of technology that can solve so many brick walls.

This, of course, comes with downsides, too. Because of misattributed paternity in which DNA doesn’t lie even though traditional paper documents might, some people who have been “the” genealogist for a particular family turn out not to be related by blood (I and many other argue that this differentiates between “family history” – the kinship from your childhood raising and traditions learned in it – as opposed to pure “genealogy,” the bloodline alone).

There’s one more column to come in this series, addressing an important gap in that original curriculum.

Would you believe that I didn’t spent a minute of time on newspapers?