So what is the point of genealogy?

The Oxford dictionary says genealogy is the “study and tracing of lines of descent.” That is really kind of a dull-sounding subject. I actually find exposing the roots of my family quite entertaining.

Anyone reading this post is likely involved in family research activities – like me possibly extensively. We kind of take it for granted that everyone should be interested in the history of their ancestors and we are usually a bit disappointed when all we meet are glazed-over expressions when the subject comes up.

The results of genealogical studies have no commercial value, unless you are trying to publish and sell a book about an event your ancestors might have been a involved in; they are not part of any production of goods or services that others want or would pay for; they certainly don’t help to alleviate any ills of society. The money we spend, though, does support various commercial entities and archives that provide employment, so in that respect they do contribute to the economy.

I have discovered a great deal about where and how my ancestors lived by sifting through thousands of pages of parish records (Now that can be dull!), working as a volunteer to assist others find their ancestors (That can be rewarding!) and in researching data for articles I have written (That can be educational!). I have also participated in many courses, as well as webinars and conferences related to genealogy. They were all enlightening and valuable to my learning how to search for information in old records and to meeting other interesting people engaged in similar pursuits. And I have published a lot about our family's history in articles, on this blog and in a book especially assembled for family members.

I think my understanding of general history is better having found actual people related to me who were alive during important events of the past few hundred years. I have also been able to combine my geological expertise with my genealogical experience to appreciate what and how physical conditions affected the lives of my ancestors. That has resulted in even more things to write and talk about.

In reality, no matter how much work we do or what sources we investigate, our studies of past family members can only take us back so far. We are lucky if we can find information on ancestors in records prior to the 18^th century (notwithstanding the many people who insist they are descended from Charlemagne!).

We may have had relatives who fought with Lord Horatio Nelson at Trafalgar in 1805; there may have been family members who are listed as victims of the Great Plague in 1666; perhaps an ancestor was a carpenter or mason who came to help rebuild London after the Great Storm of 1703; or maybe there were people related to you who made the long and arduous voyage to America in the 17^th and 18^th centuries to pursue new opportunities and a better life. These would be very interesting stories if we could uncover the details of those individuals’ involvement and experiences.

Most of us find it exciting if we come across some distant cousin who was in trouble with the law. It’s like falling into a new James Paterson novel only we have a personal connection with the perpetrator (hoping, though, there was no homicide involved).

Now there are ways to analyze DNA. Who does not aspire to find a direct physical connection to some noteworthy person of history, perhaps even royalty? Or be able to trace their way back to the beginnings of the human species in Africa and see definitively what paths their ancestors took that resulted in their families being where they are today. All of that seems tremendously exciting, as well as in tune with complex technical aspects of the society in which we live.

The main point of genealogy for me, I guess, is just in satisfying a curiosity about my family’s history and where I come from. Equally important, it fills many hours of my retirement that would otherwise be empty. That would be very dull, indeed! We should certainly be thankful for those thousands of people who have gone before us to record information and make it available in print or online so we can read it, otherwise we would not have such a pastime to enjoy at all.

The period that includes the lives of my ancestors encompasses but a few grains in the sands of time of human history. We cannot trace our specific familial origins back thousands of years even though we know we had direct ancestors who lived that long ago. So is the exercise really all that significant?

I think what I am saying is that we should not take it all very seriously (unless, of course, it’s your business). Our research will not add much, if anything, to any documentation of historical events but really only satisfy some of that curiosity I mentioned above. Not that we should not approach it with the idea of doing it right and demonstrating the connections we uncover are true.

Family history studies, I believe, are supposed to just be about enjoying the experiences of discovering stories about people to whom you may be related, especially if you can learn whether you have shared similar experiences, interests or abilities, however far apart in time they might have been.

So – are you having fun – reading obituaries and other similarly exciting tales?

To be ignorant of what occurred before you were born is to remain perpetually a child. For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history?

~Marcus Tullius Cicero, 106-43 BC

My Grandfather and Wild Bill Hickok

OK, the title above is a bit of a mis-direction. My grandfather did not know Wild Bill Hickok. But he may have heard about him while he was growing up in Kansas.

Edwin Miller was born in Manhattan, Riley County, Kansas on 17 February 1870. His parents, Isaac and Alice Miller had migrated to the area from Indiana, initially by wagon train, in 1866. They settled on bottom lands of the Big Blue River in June 1868, having stopped for a year or so in Westfield, Illinois, where their first child was born. The railroad had just reached the Manhattan area bringing with it farmers and business people looking for new opportunities. Their original homestead probably lies under Tuttle Creek Lake, formed after the Big Blue River was damned for the purpose of flood control in 1951.

The Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fé Railway, Union Pacific Railway and Kansas Pacific Railway were prime factors in the expansion of settlement in the western US. Several sites along the Kansas section became centres for the distribution of goods and services, including the burgeoning cattle industry of Oklahoma and Texas. 

 

The Kansas Pacific main line shown on an 1869 map highlighting locations of the towns of Manhattan and Abilene. The thickened portion along the line indicates the extent of the land grants available to settlers. At the time of the map, the line extended only as far as western Kansas (section in green). The extension to the Colorado Territory (section in red) was completed the following year. (retreived from the Kansas Pacific Railway Wikipedia website 12 December 2017)

Abilene became an important terminus of the Chisholm Trail, where cattle from south Texas were driven and sold.

1873 Map of Chisholm Trail with subsidiary trails in Texas (retrieved from Wikipedia Commons on 12 December 2017) completed the following year. 

(retrieved from the Kansas Pacific Railway Wikipedia website 12 December 2017  

To get back to Wild Bill and my grandfather – James Butler (“Wild Bill”) Hickok succeeded Thomas James Smith as Abilene’s Police Chief. The city was one of many centres established following the introduction of the railroads into the region, in particular for the sale of cattle. Among some of the more notorious others in Kansas were Caldwell, Dodge City, Ellsworth, Newton and Wichita. Abilene was a lawless place until Smith’s appointment on 4 June 1870. Among his actions, he sternly enforced the town bylaw prohibiting the carrying of guns and clamped down on men, mainly drovers, who wanted to let off steam after a long ride on the cattle trail. Dance hall girls were restricted to locations south of the railroad tracks (the Devil’s Addition). Smith was killed trying to arrest accused murderers and outlaws Andrew McConnell and Moses Miles on 2 November 1870. Hickok was a reputed and fearsome gunfighter. He lasted until December 1871 and ended with the shooting of saloon owner Phil Coe and the death of Deputy Marshall Mike Williams.

Manhattan is only about 40 miles from Abilene. It is certainly probable that the Miller family heard about the goings-on in Abilene and the gunplay that was rampant there and in other towns. The Miller family farmed in Riley County until 1893 when they left to homestead in Oklahoma. Young Edwin may have grown up hearing such names as Bat Masterton, Clay Allison, Doc Holliday, Jesse James, John Wesley Hardin or Wyatt Earp. All were in Kansas during the 1870s and 80s.

 

Photo of a train of covered wagons, oxen and men on horseback setting our from Manhattan, Kansas about 1860 (retrieved from Kansas Historical Society website 8 December 2017)

I wonder if my grandfather knew about these larger-than-life men living at the time he was growing up. It’s curious to me now that he grew up in a time and place not far removed from where the likes of Wild Bill Hickok lived out part of his life. Looking back on my experiences with my grandfather, I never connected him or his family with the Old West that I saw on TV many years later. Of course, at the time I did not know where he came from and could not appreciate the time period in which he was raised.

Did he play “Cowboys and Indians” the way my friends and I did when we were young in the 195s.? Did he give any thought to their lifestyles or attitudes? Or was the idea of people carrying guns and causing havoc part of normal life? Or was he too busy helping out on the home farm and exploits of the gunslingers never really impacted rural communities such as Manhattan, Kansas?

Did Edwin Miller ever hear about Wild Bill Hickok? I really have no idea. I would like to think he did, if only through reports in the local newspapers. I hope he did not think of such men as heroes though. Most of them, other than perhaps Thomas James Smith certainly were not!

DNA…Again!

DNA tests have been in the genealogical news often recently. Every company who offers testing seems to have a special price on for the US Thanksgiving and Christmas season. Most blogs I read have posted comments on the tool, encouraging readers to get their DNA evaluated and see if any new cousins pop up.

I have dealt with the subject before (DNA Matches) when I commented on my own experiences. They have been mixed but I still hold out hope that something will come from the Y-DNA results of some family members.

National Geographic of course has added its voice to testing, offering readers a discount on to join its GENO 2.0 project. They indicate over 820,000 people have already taken part. Results of tests are touted to give participants their regional ancestry makeup as far back as 200,000 years, a deep ancestry report showing where ancestors lived and migrated, their hominin ancestry and now historical genius matches. The latter might show which famous geniuses might be relatives.

In the most recent, Christmas issue of Family Tree (UK), there is an article about a DNA project to build a worldwide family tree. (By the way, I have a contribution in that issue as well about Your ancestors and the Little Ice Age which I hope you will read.)

The article starts off with, “An ancestry DNA firm has set up a unique research initiative with universities across the world to create a global family tree based on people’s DNA.” They want to produce a detailed genetic map with their One Family One World project. They have developed lesson plans that span science, geography, history and social studies to show people how we are all connected. Their objectives are interesting and laudable.

In all the discussions about DNA testing there have also been alarms raised about how the information could be used or obtained by groups or agencies that individuals getting tested never anticipated. James Tanner commented on some of the recent news reports in his blog post of 20 November 2017, Is genealogically submitted DNA discoverable in a criminal investigation? Basically he says, don’t worry about it…the rules of evidence likely preclude the likelihood of law enforcement ever getting their hands on the data. I would not be surprised, though, to see life insurance companies trying to find out how you tested in order to assess your health risks better.

Anyway, to get back to the livingdna website, my first reaction to the idea of trying to assemble a world-wide tree was…Why?

I personally doubt that it is possible to find out how all 7.6 billion people in the world today are related or how they came to be where they are. Man…it is hard enough to find all the living members of my own extended family and learn who they are, where they live and what they do.

It may be a laudable exercise to show how everyone is related if we go back far enough, but we basically already know that from anthropological, archeological and geological studies. Is there really a point to finding out how a farmer in a remote location of Qinghai province, China, is connected to a dentist is Pasadena, California. Genealogy has its limits, mostly due to records only going back a few hundred years. Beyond that it’s unreasonable to think we can confirm familial relationships. DNA may tell us something about the story of migration of our particular forebears, but that is likely to be hundreds if not thousands of generations past. Hardly relevant if you are looking for your 3^rd great-grandparents!

 

Early Human migration patterns (retrieved from https://www.thinglink.com/scene/844602605974847489 webpage 5 December 2017)

The livingdna project kind of reminds me of the goals of the FamilySearch Family Tree which is composed of linked trees submitted by some 22 million users. Over the years I have looked at some of the results, for people in my family I know a lot about, and found many instances where information was just plain wrong. One missed tie between individuals means a whole series of branches will be suspect. Not to demean their efforts but multiply a single mistake by millions and you really have to question the usefulness of the whole project.

DNA tests are a great tool to use for finding relatives, mostly those still living. They might, though, offer a different perspective on the family and perhaps even some new names. Using it to go back several generations is of limited value unless you find those living cousins who might have copies of the documents that demonstrate family connections. Past a couple of generations any DNA similarities might well only fall in the margin of error and it won’t be possible to know if it is real.

Believing that you can go back thousands of years to find ancestors is a fairy tale. Migration patterns are an interesting subject but that is information you can get from many scientific studies.

The livingdna program looks very interesting but, outside of educating people about the common origins of humanity, its goals unite mankind in a common tree may be beyond what is really possible. Check it out!