This
past week, being the end of one year and the beginning of a new one, there have
been many blog posts and other online comments about starting again, or at
least, if not actually starting anew, then beginning with a new purpose and
strategy to find out about all those elusive ancestors. None of us are going to
begin our research again – we have too much already accomplished – though we
might take a crack at reviewing how we have been doing it or resolve (there’s a
nice New Year’s phrase) to be more attentive to the sources we use as well as
look at alternative methods of finding pertinent information.
Everyone
seems to be gung ho on discovering new data or ways to find new data. I
suppose, in a way, that is a beginning of sorts. But it is not like we all
weren’t doing some good work during the past year or that it was all in vain. January
1st just seems like a good date to reflect on past genealogical
activities and renew efforts to do even better during the next 365 days to find
the people who began our families, assuming that is possible.
In
terms of human evolution we don’t really know when the beginning was. The species
Homo sapiens (and
thus the families of this group) emerged from Homo erectus about 300,000 years ago. Sapiens is the Latin name for
"wise" (Home sapiens = wise
man, deduced from his apparent intelligence compared to previous species) and
was introduced in 1758 by Carl
Linnaeus.
 |
| Schematic representation of the emergence of H. sapiens from earlier species of Homo. from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_sapiens |
Homo erectus rose from the
genus, Australopithecine, in Africa some 2.5 million years
ago. So human families go back a long way, not to the beginning of the Earth,
over 4.5 billion years ago, but still quite a significant time period. DNA
studies pretty much confirm this historical line making us all related in some
sense. The time of humans on Earth is miniscule compared to its total history
and I discussed in a 7 February 2017 post, Keeping
It All in Perspective.
For
many if not most genealogists the “beginning” might date only from the Protestant Reformation, in
the early 16th century. Around this time many if not most countries
in Europe (the Modern World of the time) began diligently keeping records of
births, marriages and deaths (BMD). I wrote about that in a post on the Pharos Blog, titled Your
Oldest Document. We can really only define the beginning of our own
families on the basis of written text showing the names of our forebears. And
we can really only properly identify those as our forebears through continuous
records extending back from present day.
There
may still be some BMD records kept in Catholic Church archives (or in the repositories
of other religions) possibly in individual parish churches, but few go back any
further that the protestant registers. They were either destroyed in the many
conflicts between states over the centuries or left to rot in the basements of
churches or civic buildings. Some researchers believe that there are
medieval-aged records that can or might identify people but tying them to
specific families is problematic.
So
are we beginning again in 2018? Not so much! Are we taking stock of how we do
things? Probably! Can we find the very first family in our line? Nope! Hope
springs eternal that we will get further back in our ancestral parade in the
coming year, though.
