Posted on 05/08/2008 3:18:15 PM PDT by forkinsocket
Leo McKinstry says the current craze for genealogy reflects an unhealthy combination of snobbery and inverse snobbery, and is a poor replacement for national history
When I visited the National Archives at Kew last week the place was full of them, scurrying about with their plastic wallets in hand, a look of eager concentration on their faces. It was impossible to escape their busy presence as they whispered noisily to relatives or whooped over the discovery of some new piece of information.
These were the followers of one of Britain’s fastest-growing craze, the mania for researching family history. Studying bloodlines and tracing ancestral roots was once the preserve of the aristocracy. Today, as I saw at the National Archives, it has become a favourite activity of the British public. We are becoming a nation of obsessive genealogists. According to a recent study by the polling organisation YouGov, 28 per cent of British people have tried at some stage to trace their family tree, and 10 per cent of the population are currently doing so. It is said that genealogy websites are the most commonly visited on the internet after pornography. The website Genes Reunited, which claims to be ‘the UK’s number one family tree and genealogy site’, boasts that it has no fewer than eight million members. Another major web company, Find My Past, says that it has a registered usership of 1.32 million people and a mailing list of almost 600,000.
Ten years ago, there was just one mainstream genealogy magazine. Now there are seven. Another indicator of this fixation with family history is the phenomenal success of the BBC series Who Do You Think You Are?, whose weekly episodes feature different celebrities tracing their roots.
(Excerpt) Read more at spectator.co.uk ...
What we discovered only increased our national pride, not diminished it.
There must be a great deal of interest in genealogy for websites to be in 2nd place on the Internet.
So far I have not found any famous ancestors nor any horse thieves. There has to be a horse thief back there some where, I just haven't found him yet!
The oldest ancestor I have found so far is a dirt farmer born about 1720. He lived in north-central North Carolina in the 1760's. His only claim to fame is that he signed a petition protesting the corruption of English appointed county officials (times have not changed as much as we think in the last 250 years).
In 1766 or before a group of small farmers was taking shape in North Carolina (many of them were of Scot-Irish decent,,,,which my wife says that explains many of my character flaws). This group was called Regulators.
Riots by the Regulators occurred in 1768 and 1770 caused by corrupt taxes and property confiscation.
Things came to a head in early 1771 when the English governor's forces of 1,000 routed 2,000 Regulators at The Battle of Alamance (NC) on May 16, 1771. Casualties governor's forces 70, Regulators 210.
The Governor took about 10 prisoners and hanged one farmer on the spot to teach the Regulators a lesson. 6 of these prisoners were later hung on June 19, 1771, 4 days after their trials.
A footnote: After the English forces won The Battle of Alamance, the Governor then ordered his men to travel the country side and disarm all farmers (gun control 1771 style).
This was backwoods North Carolina not Boston, Philadelphia or New York so it is rarely found in history books.
Perhaps someday one of my great grand kids will want to find out more about his Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, Great, GreatGrandad and his relatives.
Genealogy is both interesting and addictive, once I find an ancestor I want to find his/her parents, then their parents and then......
Contrary to what Mr McKinstry says, I have meet a minuscule number of snobs when digging into the past.
No, not Magnussen. Alderman. One of my fifth cousins provided this information.
You are right. It is very addictive. That is how I got the 20,000 names in my data base. I would find one person on ancestry.com and I just wanted to find his/her parents. I traced the ancestry of someone who married into my maternal grandfather’s family back to King Clovis, the Riparian of Cologne in 410. Thought someone might like to have that info one of these days. It is not often that anyone can go that far back. One thing that has helped me a lot is just typing in the name + descendants and lots of sites would be linked.
He’s not gay, he’s a British journalist. Easy mistake.
Besides, you probably only care about genealogy for the same reason I do.
They were from Central Illinois, and one cannot overestimate the love and loyalty the common folk there had for Abraham Lincoln. My family became Republicans because of Lincoln. Grant was from Illinois as well. Another poster posted to me about the nature of the Republican Party. There was a lot of corruption in the Republican Party emanating particularly from New York and patronage related to the Port Authority there. But Lincoln was a truly great man and a great President. Grant does not get the credit he deserves. Illinois is an interesting state. William Jennnings Bryan was actually from Illinois and went to college in Central Illinois. But he was not ever embraced by many in Central Illinois because his shortcomings were well known and my family were solidly behind McKinley. Of course Reagan came from Illinois as well. But Illinois now is as rotten a blue socialist state as can be imagined. Oddly, both Democrats have ties to Illinois and Clinton and Obama are so pathetic that they make another Democrat favorite son like Adlai Stevenson look almost appealing.
NA
What is a NA ancestor?
The Republican Party was established before Lincoln came on the national scene. Its establishment was by anti-slavery activists. Any real student of history knows that neither the purpose nor the cause of the Civil War cannot be simplistically reduced to freeing the slaves. Whether freeing the slaves was an intent of Lincoln is still up for debate. But once the events of the crazy blood thirsty murdering Abolitionist John Brown took place. The South and their militias believed they were forced to act. Lincoln freed the slaves because, he read the events as forcing him to. There was a lot of corruption in the Republican Party after Lincoln. Much of it was centered in the state of New York and dealt with patronage as related to the Port Authority. But the Republican Party was on the right side of principle on Dred Scott and it is now on the right side of principle opposing Roe v Wade. Republicans get lots of heat on civil rights legislation of the 60’s some of it just but mostly out of proportion. The southern Democrats opposed it vehemently. And when it passed, the south started to turn Republican.
So, is the DNA strand turning clockwise or counter-clockwise?
It turns clockwise north of the equator and counterclockwise south of the equator.
said with straight face
Native American. I sure have puzzled a lot of people with my abbreviations.
In the early 1990's someone was talking about storing genealogy information on PC's. Scary thought!
Then the explosion of information available to researchers "on the net".
The sharing of information on the Internet is one of the greatest things that has happened to genealogy. (my opinion)
Sharing DNA has brought a new tool to many.
Still there is the thrill of opening a book or other record and seeing a newly discovered ancestor's name in print or written word.
Sort of like my gaucho toilet...
(Also not smiling.)
;-D
It is always a thrill to find someone you have never heard of researching the same person I am. I have come across a few bad apples on some sites but I just ignore them and go to someone nicer. Just 10 years ago, I never thought I would be so hooked on something like this! A cousin’s wife had been into genealogy and going all over the country to find records and when she showed me what she had, I became interested. I also discovered that info on the web can be so very wrong with kids being born before the parents, etc. I just ignore them until I can find other records.
gaucho toilet...
Mexicans have toilets?
still not smiling.
Just a heads up
Have been doing my genealogy research for over 30 years.
Have tons of major records and information
But
What you find on most genealogy sites should be checked
in a few different ways as there are tons of errors.
This includes Ancestry.com (what the general public enter as their history)
Also Family History LDS site. Again, tons of errors.
More sites, but you get the point, just do your research,
don’t just copy every dot and line as fact.
Census Records. You can be thrown off if you don’t think
laterally.
Names, mostly written by clerk as heard not exact spelling
Age, date of birth not always correct nor place of birth.
Remember, the information is only as good as the person
who gave it to the clerk.
Hitting a wall in genealogy is one of most frustrating things that can happen.
One case of it I heard about was told to me by a honest woman with a straight face, I have no reason to doubt it.
Her grandmother had a sister who was never married.
The sister bore 10 children, each by a different father.
The term Wood's Colt applied to all the children.
This occurred in the days before birth certificates.
gaucho - Argentina
caballero - Mexico
Southern hemisphere - Argentina
Northern hemisphere - Mexico
Me neither. :-I
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Thanks, that’s good advice. I haven’t done that much, but just finding some screwed up junk (grandfather’s name was wrong, for starters) on the LDS site means these broadbased databases are best used as a guide for further research. :’)
My favorite scrambling influence is the former practice of naming conventions, such that each generation had members named after grandparents, uncles, aunts, as well as (often) both parents. Not only are there loads of first cousins on both sides with the same few names, there are generally some siblings with exactly the same name because the first carrier of the name died in childhood. :’)
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