Genealogy : (from the Oxford Dictionary of Current English , 1993)
- descent traced continuously from an ancestor, pedigree
- study of pedigrees
- organism's line of development from earlier sources
The word genealogy is often confused with other similar words.
Genealogy is NOT :geology : science of the earth's crust, strata, origin of its rocks, etc.
gynaecology : science of the physiological functions and diseases of women
geniality : from the adverb genial: jovial, sociable, kindly.
Novice people also often misspell it as geneology.
We sincerely hope, that after browsing these pages, at least, you will be able to spell it right ....
Genealogy is best explained as Family History Research, or by the more popular expression: tracing your roots. It is the quest for the ancestral lines of family related individuals, as far back in history as possible.
Genealogy has a very long history: in fact, it even is older than History itself ! Indeed, long before people wrote down events, they kept track of lines of ancestors either by memorizing them or by writing them down, to pass them to the future generations.
People often depicted their family relations using the metaphor of a tree.
Genealogical interest existed in ancient cultures as well as in the contemporary Western and non-Western civilizations.
Since the 20th century genealogists are associated in societies. There are many hundreds of such societies all over the world, often organized into federations at a regional and national level.
Genealogy is, a few professional genealogists left aside, a leisure activity practised by hundreds of thousands of people in the Old and New world.
Some sciences rely on genealogy too.
The Tree as a metaphor for Family Relations
To the Arabs genealogy was of great tribal importance. In Arabic the term for genealogy is shajaratu-n-nasab, shajaratu meaning tree and nasab meaning partition, inheritance.
In the Western culture, family relations are often depicted as trees. Roots and branches are words used as much as genealogical terms as for parts of real trees.
The metaphor of the tree originates from two distinct sources:
- the Arbor Juris. This is a representation of close family relationships (father, mother, siblings, uncles, aunts, cousins, nephews, nieces etc...) useful for reference in questions of inheritance and blood relationships, used by lawyers in the Middle Ages. The Christian Church adopted it for showing the limits within which consanguinity was held to be a bar to marriage. From a mere geometrical design with inscribed names of grades, it was made to rest on a foundation (trunk), and given decorative features, such as leaves. Later on, real persons where depicted sitting on the branches of a tree.
- the Tree of Jesse. The Tree of Jesse is based on a text of Isaiah: Et egredietur uirga de radice Iesse, et flos de radice eius ascendet. (Is. 11, 1-3). Arround the year 1000 this sentence became to be represented in an artistic manner. Jesse (the radice) is depicted at the bottom as a sleeping person, from whom a tree springs from his body, representing a few of his descendants. The tree ends with the representation of Mary (the virga) and Christ. (the flos)
From the 12th century onwards, the first representations of royal family trees can be found modelled after the Tree of Jesse. Only at the end of the Middle Ages, the family tree representation becomes widespread among noble families. Examples:
- Arbor Juris. From: J. Bouteillier, Somme Rural, ms. arround 1395. (Paris, Bibl. Nat., ms. fr. 202)
- Genealogy of René II de Lorraine. (Paris, Bibl. de l'Institut, 15th century) clearly inspired by the Tree of Jesse.
- De Stamboom (the Family Tree), painting by G. Verlinde (1980). The family tree is interpreted literally, the ascendants being represented by the natural inhabitants of a tree: birds.
Genealogy in Non-Western Civilizations
Between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries every important Hindu ruler had a retainer, called a bhat or a chaman, whose job was to chant his patron's pedigree on ceremonial occasions and to burst into paeans about his glorious ancestry. In miniatures of the sumptuous durbars, or courts of the period, the bhat can often be spotted: he is usually an old man, steadying himself with a stick and holding out his free hand in the act of declaiming.
Some of the oldest Indian records are the pilgrim registers that have been kept for centuries at Hindu shrines, mostly in the northern part of the country, by a subcaste of brahmans, called the pandas. 27 of the 142 shrines draw great numbers of pilgrims from all over the country. Some have been in operation since 1000 BC.
By the 2nd century AD some of the pandas had begun to keep oral track of the more prominent families of pilgrims who had been coming over the years. The practice spread to other shrines and it eventually embraced pilgrims of every caste. By around 1000 AD there were to many names and generations to remember and the pandas started writing them down. The registers are called bahis.
The pandas are part priest, part businessman. Over the years they have divided their customers by geographical areas and by caste, and each developed a specific clientele. When a pilgrim comes to the shrine, he looks for the panda of his region and caste. The panda starts asking about the name of the father or grandfather of the pilgrim, until they hit on the right name. When the pilgrim has found the panda of his ancestors, both go to see the panda's registers, which have the names of the pilgrim's family for as long as it had been coming to the shrine.
The tradition of ancestor veneration, which is at the core of Chinese culture, began in the Chou dynasty (1122-256 B.C.) when patrilineal clans replaced the fratrilineal structures of the Shang. Feudal lords began to burn incense as an offering to their forefathers, to keep track of their descent, and to observe rites of succession in which the eldest son was presented with a piece of sod as a symbol of the fief he was inheriting. Confucius in the 6th century B.C., in the five basic relationships in his social code, gave greatest importance to the relation between father and son.
The longest known pedigree in the world is from K'ung Ch'iu, the great-great-great-great grandfather of K'ung-Fut-zu or Confusius (8th century B.C.) Their descendants in straight male line in the 85th generation of this man, are Wei-yi (born 1939) and Wei-ning (born 1947) who live nowadays in Taiwan.
The ruling class of Japan was even more obsessed with lineage and descent than the Chinese. In the third of fourth century the House of Yamato, gained ascendancy, and the other clans devoted their genealogical energies to establihsing a connection with it. The Yamatos are still in power; the present-day emperor of Japan is the 125th emperor of the dynasty, which enjoys the longest run of hereditary rule in world history.
Since "high birth" was the only prerequisite to practically every position of importance in Japan, in the year 815 also a 1,182 noble families had their genealogies done. Samurai warriors and Shinto priests also had to meet specific genealogical requirements, and the preparation of their pedigrees was done by professionals.
One means of being remembered after death has been available to everybody in Japan: the kakocho or necrologies, which buddhist priests have kept of their parishioners since the 13th century. The registration of a posthumous "vow name" of the parishioner who had died, along with the name of his chief mourner became widespread in the 7th century. (BTW, these necrologies are not restricted to humans: in 1863 a swan was registered ...)
In the Arab world, genealogy had already become important well before the time of the Prophet: nobility, a man's proudest attribute, was a function of his tribal affiliation. Mohammed belonged to the Quraish tribe of Mecca. Until the middle of the sixteenth century, the Caliph of all Islam had to be a descendant of the Quraish.
Among Arabs today, traceable descent from the Prophet has cachet, something like being a member of the royal family of England. The descendants can demonstrate their descent by wearing a green or black turban and sash. Shiite descendants like the ayatollah Khomeini, prefer black to green.
Mohammed had many children, but only one, a daughter named Fatima, had issue. Fatima married her first cousin Ali and has two sons, Hasan and Husain. Male-line descendants of Fatima are known as sharifs, while those through Hussein are known as sayyids. (King Hussein of Jordan is a sharif, and so is King Hasan of Morocco, both of the Hashemite tribe) The Shiite Muslims tend to be particularly interested in genealogy.
The ancient Hebrews were as intensely preoccupied with descent as their Arab cousins. Their basic texts were, of course, the 28 genealogical tables in the Bible. Each of the roughly fourteen million Jews alive today is almost certainly descended from at least one of the 97.000 survivors of the war with Rome who, according to the historian Josephus, left Palestine after 70 AD. Specifically they would be descended from the tribes of Judah, Benjamin or Simeon, because the other nine tribes of Israel disappeared in the Diaspora after the Babylonian captivity in 597 BC. Most Jewish surnames are very recent, ant they were imposed by governments with European naming traditions.
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