Threads

Well, now I’ve done it.

When a person mentions genealogy he becomes very popular all of a sudden, as if there’s some secret knowledge he possesses that if divulged will loose the keys to the kingdom. There really is no such knowledge, just a few tricks that anyone can employ. What prevents people who are interested from diving in may be the thought that it can’t be that easy.

But it is that easy, with a few caveats. So this week I’ll undertake a small tutorial (with some observations). Then I can simply send the link to those who inquire.

There are a few facts about genealogy that are obvious but at the same time counterintuitive. They need to be understood or the process quickly becomes frustrating.

The first is that every question you answer introduces two new questions. You have nailed down the identity of an ancestor. Fine. But who were that ancestor’s mother and father? So you keep going, knowing (but maybe not recognizing) that when you have answered those two questions, you now have four more questions.

It can be maddening unless you set some limits. This isn’t always easy for a very human reason: We all want to be descended from someone famous and consequential, and we all want to find that person. But here’s a secret: We all are descended from someone (many someones, actually) famous and consequential, if we go back far enough.

But with each step into the past we dilute the relationship. Last week I mentioned a search for proof of my sisters’ and my having descended from a Revolutionary War soldier. It ended up being fairly simple. In fact, since then I’ve found another. Both of these are on my father’s side. There are others, on my mother’s side.

The one last week was a fellow named Thomas Cummings, who turns out to be our great-great-great grandfather. Wow! — until you do the arithmetic and discover that you have 32 great-great-great grandparents. That one of them served in the war is suddenly a little less remarkable. Then I discovered that another of the 32, Malachi Powell, also fought for American independence.

Go back just one more generation and there are now 64 names on the list. A generation more — just a few decades — and it’s 128. Then 256, 512, 1024, and so on. You don’t have to go back too many generations before it becomes almost a statistical certainty that you’ll find someone notable. But in exchange, that person’s contribution to you has diminished. The two veterans on my father’s side (so far — the research isn’t complete) together contributed just 1/16 of my genetic makeup.

So by the time you’ve gotten back only a few generations you have done a lot of work for little return. It’s best to know why you’re undertaking the project. Getting a sense of your family’s history and place in the world is a good reason. Then the famous persons you encounter are just the cherry on top.

Since last week I solved the longstanding mystery of the Powell clan before 1699. I am happy to report that my ancestors were not criminals who changed their name in transit. The Powells came here from Wales in the last third of the 17^th^ century, apparently about 1682. They had been in Wales for a century or so, and before that mostly in England. Whew.

Disregarding my own advice, I kept going down the Powell rabbit hole, having decided on the fly that I’ll stop after I get to a.d. 1500. Even so, I’ll be filling in those blanks for a while.

The second rule is that not everything you find is true, with the related rule that the information changes.

An illustration is my “discovery” that the Powell name got born when the son of one Hywel Ap Dafydd, also known as Howell Ap Walter, said the hell with it in 1539 and got himself called John Powell. But then I found that Hywel/Howell’s father, Dafydd Fongam ap Dafydd of Caeo, is listed as having been born in 1290, meaning that when Hywel was born his father was 220 years old. I found another place wherein the ancestor became a father at age 10. I do not think that these things are likely. So bring your common sense with you on your trip back through time.

Lots more information is getting collected and added to the databases. I’ve found many ancestors about whom little was known in 2018, the last time I dove into it, but whose whole life histories are detailed and confirmed now. And I’ve found a couple of people who seemed one thing seven years ago but now are shown to have been entirely different. The information does indeed change as more of it is uncovered.

There are lots of genealogy sites to help in one’s search. I have accounts on two of them. One is kind of the standard, FamilySearch.org. It is affiliated with the Latter Day Saints for reasons I’ll not attempt to explain. It is unsurpassed. It is essential. The other is geni.com. Both offer free accounts but with geni.com you don’t get much without paying for it, and I have the geni.com account only because I opened it years ago when it seemed to offer more for free. FamilySearch.org provides documentation. This is important because it lets you figure out where there are such errors as the 220-year-old father, which in my case led me to backtrack, find a mistake I’d made, and end up with far-better-documented and therefore more reliable Powells — actually named “Powell” — back to 1558.

Another place to look for useful information is usgenweb.org. WikiTree.com can be helpful, but I’m disinclined to use it as a single source. It can provide confirmation, though and sometimes provide hints for filling in the blanks. A very useful site is www.findagrave.com, about which more in a bit.

One important aspect of using multiple sources is that you can compare them. Where they agree, one may have more information than the other about a particular ancestor. Finding agreement is very good, but it’s important to check the sources, because one may merely be citing the other. There are other sites that provide useful information as well, also for free. (An important tip: don’t send any of them your DNA information. I’m not kidding. It’s sending them the biological equivalent of your Social Security Number. The potential for misuse far outweighs any imagined or real gain.)

The farther back you go, the more sparse and often less reliable the information is likely to be. It is a happy fact that many people are willing to go to old churches and graveyards and photograph and write down what they find, and post it to genealogy sites, which contributes to the body of knowledge. But things like spelling and dates were often approximations. (Sadly, we’re entering a new era of illiteracy; our interest in precision was brief.)

As mentioned above, findagrave.com is a very useful site. It has genealogical information that is literally engraved in stone. In my family’s case it even proved that a generations-long family legend is false. The story was that aforementioned Thomas Cummings was married to Sarah Henry, Patrick Henry’s sister. Yes, he was married to Sarah Henry, but not the one who was a sibling of the founding father. A cousin, maybe. Findagrave untangles it all. It also proves that Thomas was a Revolutionary War soldier.

(Findagrave.com is disparaged by those “scholars” who take pictures of themselves next to graves and post them on YouTube. They are angry because the GPS coordinates are not always absolutely accurate, so they might have to do some actual work in locating the graves. Those persons often then spin yarns about the persons in those graves that are as fanciful as my supposedly fertile 220-year-old alleged ancestor.)

The resources are there. My third rule is that it is best to approach it all with the attitude of an amateur detective, seeking to solve mysteries. If doing puzzles appeals to you, there’s a chance that genealogy won’t drive you crazy. Not at first, anyway.

For as long as there has been genealogy there have been two standard forms, the “pedigree chart” and what I call the family chart — it probably has a better name. The former is the actual family tree. It looks like the brackets in a sports tournament, except that the part where it’s reduced to just one person is you, with the ancestors filling the brackets. The family chart is just the reverse: an ancestor couple’s children are listed, with an asterisk next to the one of interest — the one from whom you are descended. (You can’t do all the descendants of all the children because then you would have a chart of everyone in the world when you’re done, and that leaves you no better off than you were when you started.) This used to be done by hand. I have my mom’s work in front of me as I write this, and I’m amazed by the amount of work she did in those pre-computer days.

Nowadays we have software to help us. I would not say that genealogy programs make it all easy, but it does make the difficulties more easily surmounted. As mentioned last week, the closest to standard is an application called Gramps. It is maddening at first, and there’s no useful documentation to help. There are videos about it but, as is so often the case they tend toward “look what I can do!” rather than “here’s how you can do it.” But figuring it out is worth the trouble. There is even a dummy family tree you can practice with until you have it figured out. Remember not to let it get conflated with your own real family tree!

Two things in Gramps are your special friends. One is the tree chart. It transforms your entries, which are like the family chart I mention above, into pedigree charts — your family tree. This is useful in telling you what you’ve done, what you have left to do, and where you got carried away. I would be lost without it. The other is the “sanity check.” It alerts you to impossibilities, such as parents born after their children were. Or 220-year-old fathers. This is important because after a while the dates get jumbled in your mind.

Gramps is free. There are all kinds of paid-for genealogy software. Some of them are equivalent to coloring books, while some are very complicated and very expensive. Whatever you choose, make sure it supports the GEDCOM (Genealogical Data Communication) format. This means the tree you produce and the associated data can be read by other programs. It needn’t use GEDCOM as its native format (Gramps, for instance, uses XML), but it should be able to import and export to it.

With the advent of “artificial intelligence,” we can assume that before long there will be an AI program that produces a complete family tree at the push of a button. I think that there’s little that could be less satisfying.

As you do genealogy, you think about your forebears — really think about them. You wonder about their lives, what they looked like, all of it. You take a bit of interest in history. When you encounter ancestors who were in a village for a length of time, you might look up that village and learn a bit about it. If a bunch of ancestors moved from one place to another all of a sudden, you might try to find out what was going on at the time: Disease? Invasion? A monarch who liked to behead wives who didn’t give him male children, which led him to execute Catholics? A general migration for some other reason? Doing the work is the difference between being a real American and being a shallow coast dweller who travels by airliner instead of driving.

Also, AI is and always shall be capable of corruption and manipulation. I think that the misuse of “artificial intelligence” will prove an ever-growing threat in every field it touches. As if we didn’t already have enough ever-growing threats.

So if you’re interested in genealogy, get and learn Gramps. You’ll be glad you did.

The final lesson, tip, fact is a bit philosophical, but it is also essential: Remember always that the odds are and forever have been stacked against your very existence. As your tree grows to thousands of people all in your direct line, remember that without each and every one of them, even the ones dozens of generations back who contributed one-ten-thousandth of 1 percent to your genetic makeup, you would not exist. It is important to ponder. Do with it what you will, but it is a fact. With only a little thought, it irrefutably demonstrates the rarity and importance of your very own life, no matter who you are.

That’s a lesson most people never learn. A lesson that will change your outlook on everything.