ROOTS & BRANCHES

I’ve done some musing before on the concept of “who counts” as family. Over time, I’ve found more questions and fewer answers.

For me, it starts with my father Richard Lee Beidler and mother Mildred Mae Hiester. I had disagreements with each of my now deceased parents now and again but I think overall we had a relationship filled with love and scarce of drama.

I was an only child and had only five first cousins on my dad’s side and just three on my mother’s side, making my total number of close blood relatives on the small side.

Maybe this is why for a long time I looked at genealogy and family history as equivalent—rather than as complementary terms that bear considerable nuance.

But exposure to more and more people with larger families and different experiences than mine has left me feeling that my experience, which I once would have described as “normal,” is probably true for relatively few people.

Which leads to me to question: What’s the future value of the genealogy of the past—you know, the type of document-based research that looked upon genealogy strictly as relationships proven by connections either named in those documents or implied directly in enough of them?

The first flaw in limiting family history to this documentary research has been exposed by the power of DNA, which has led to the realization that document-based research is wrong fairly often in terms of biological ancestry—which in turn has the potential for implications on a person’s future physical health, based on genetic inheritance.

And yet there’s no discounting that the “people who raised you”—even if they were adoptive parents or misattributed ones—have an effect on our mental and physical health, too (Think the documented “cycle of abuse” that afflicts many families).

When I first heard people refer to a “chosen family,” I was still naively feeling that my upbringing was “normal” and that those seeking to downgrade their blood relatives and exalt a bunch of friends to the status of family … were somehow a bit off.

But now, especially as I create a “chosen family” in the genealogy world of people who feel like family, I think I finally get it and wonder whether this concept might be a large part of the future of this craft.

I know I cleave to wanting to research people—either historically or in the present day—with whom I have some sort of affinity. And that affinity might not be one of blood but rather a feeling of choice.

In the final analysis, whether by “default” or chosen, there is no denying that the family is a concept with intrinsic implications to every individual of the human race. Build your family tree—your own way!