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 ...
So, is the DNA strand turning clockwise or counter-clockwise?
(Another optical illusion indicating left or right handedness)
Take a good look at the Bill of Rights some time. It's all about "noble privilege" except that the assumption is everybody is entitled to it.
The other thing is that a vast number of the earliest ancestors left no records other than their name in a list in a church. Illiteracy was rampant.
Might be all I'd have, at least in some branches. My grandfathers were both orphans. Maternal grandfather knew who his mother was and where she was buried (I visited her grave with him), but was not sure of his birth father's last name (the father had died and the mother remarried, that's where his name came from) and then she herself died and the stepfather remarried, a 3rd marriage for him. Too many kids, so send wife 2's kids back to her relatives. Paternal grandfather was adopted, and didn't know his birth name either. Knew he came west on the orphan train. We really didn't know him either, as he and grandma split when their kids, all three of them, were still preschool age. If I had to guess, I'd guess some Spanish or possibly Portuguese on the maternal grandfather since his middle name was Carlos. The paternal is more difficult, but from his appearance, and the time he'd have been born in some Eastern City full of immigrants, would be Eastern European, possibly Polish or other Far Northern, non Scandinavian region.
Yes.
< |:)~
Same here. :-D
In the time of president lincoln, the democrats were the conservatives not the republicans. The republicans were the “tax and spend big government” party. So your boast of ancestors voting republican since the party’s inception is silly.
There are also vast numbers of "whites" with a white Scandinavian slave ancestor, and they have no idea the ancestor arrived after having been kidnapped in the far North by Swedes, or that they even have ancestors from Scandinavia.
Lucky researchers quickly find the prison barges with their Scottish, Welsh, Cornish and Irish ancestors who arrived before the Revolution.
BTW, when I find one of those guys in the line I make him into one of "God's New Men" ~ who has no ancestors. That usually cuts off any English ancestry such a person might have had.
Never heard of indentured servants, or The Irish, The Italians, and in places the Poles and even Germans (late arriving immigrants at least.
What we didn't have, was subsidies for immigrants, especially illegal ones. I guess you could call the Homestead Laws a subsidy, but at least one had to work the land to earn it, and of course one had to be a legal immigrant (which was much easier in those days to be sure).
Plus, you don't know what's going to fall out of your family tree until you shake it. :-)
The Democrats were hardly Conservatives ~ they were the functional equivalent of the Nazis in their time ~ they liked slavery, like they like dependency, and abortion, and euthenasia.
The Democrats never changed.
Same here.
And when you discover living relaatives in the home country of your great-grandfather still have letters written by him, get the local universsity history and language department interested in a translation project so you can read what was happening to a new immigrant farmer in SW Illinois, with a civil war draft looming, his worry that it may be as bad or worse than his forced stint in the Prussian Army in 1850's, the impending birth of his first child (a later letter described his wife's death and subsequent death of the newborn daughter.), trials, weather, financial panic, bankruptccy, starting over, new farm, new wife, new family and finally success.
This I would never had known if the research hadn't been done.
My mother died in 2007 at the age of 102. The local paper in the MS town where my relatives live, did an article about her several years ago. The article mentioned that she remembered when the Titanic sank and that she and her dad went to church to pray for the survivors. We had never heard that story before. She lived an amazing life but was ready to go home.
My bet is the guy has hit a wall on his genealogy like I did with mine, so now he’s bitter about it.
“I have found that ancestors fought in every war since the Revolutionary War.”
How about both sides of the Revolutionary War?
Or on both sides of the Civil War?
One of my cousins visited relatives on her dad's side in Germany who'd been waiting about three generations for the tickets!
Boy were they p.o.ed
"As a result of mass immigration, the willful destruction of our nationhood and the collapse of the traditional family, people are looking for something that will provide them with a sense of belonging."
This is probably not why all seek their ancestral links, but he offers a pretty good explanation here as to why some do.
But, I did manage to make one good thing happen. I found a lost link in my family. My grand aunt had died and her husband would not let their daughter have contact with our family (called us -- get this -- "a bunch of gypsies. this I found out AFTER my choice of user name). The sister-in-law of this daughter's son was looking for genealogy info. and I found her post. My other grand aunt and the daughter got to talk and exchange letters before the daughter died.
A relative picked up a copy of this in the early 1900s and had it translated into English.
I supplemented it with some information not known to the original German writer, sent it to an associate in Germany to translate back into German, and then to replace it in the stacks in Heidelberg where the original (and any copies) had been lost in WWII.
It's part of Heidelberg's history, and I suppose mine.
Excerpt:
Over the past few years, it seems, everybody and his brother speaks about the capitalist system in America. Before, using the word was the hallmark of marxist training or influence. Yet lately, everybody is using the word - regardless of political leaning.
It bothers me because capitalism - the word and the concept - was the brainchild of Karl Marx. As well as offering an “-ism” opposite his own -ism, it describes a rigid class society in which one class possesses the means of production, the other nothing except its labor. The latter class is called “The Proletariat” who, as Lenin declared, can lose nothing but its chains when it rises against the oppressor.
This is not the place to argue whether capitalism was the appropriate way to describe certain European societies. The point is that owning things has always been open to Americans. The moment you buy one share of stock, you part-own “means of production,” not to mention owning your home and arriving at your place of work in your own automobile - a very American image.
America never had a proletariat.
In that case, America could not have been a capitalist country.
http://balintvazsonyi.org/shns/shns100202.html
Genealogy is fun and engrossing. An interesting site is wargs.com. It has a section on the families of politicians and a section on the families of celebrities and others—including serial murderers. If you know your ancestry you probably will find many ‘cousins’. I’ve found at least two dozen well known cousins on my husband’s side. On my side only Britney Spears and John Edwards. But I keep looking.
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