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What Is Genealogy? By Govindji Patel
Posted on Wednesday, January 17 @ 00:00:00 EST by kishan
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Genealogy, according to the Collins English Dictionary is the direct descent of an individual or group from an ancestor, a chart showing the relationships and descent of an individual, group etc. In other words genealogy can be described as the research into your families past and ancestry, giving you as an individual more clarity on who you are and where you come from.
Genealogy can be as simple and as complicated as you wish to make it. You could choose just to follow one family line, more often the male family line - this tends to be the easiest. You could also choose to follow a whole ancestry line. This might be a daunting task considering that the female line is not that easy to track. Going back and checking your female line means that you will probably have to track twice as many people. Trying to track all descendants of a family line or a specific ancestor is also not an easy task to achieve. Basic family counts states that you have a mother and a father even if you are not sure who they are. People can have varying numbers of children increasing the numbers to find.
Genealogists may also only be interested in tracking a family name. Trying to find out all individuals that carry the same surname and how they are all associated with one-another, whether by marriage or groups of people. This is probably one of the hardest routes to follow especially if the surname is a very common one. The more unusual the surname is the better chances of tracking a solid family line.
Family histories are another angle of genealogy that can be looked into. This type of family tracking not only relies on the family names but also particulars about family members occupation where the individual resides or resided before passing away. A great place to begin your family history investigation is by checking family wills, deeds, birth certificates and titles.
Genealogy can simply be started at home. Speaking to family members and browsing through all family documentation will uncover a wealth of information related to your family. For genealogy to be successful a lot of emphasis should be placed on the chronological order of your investigations. Sometimes fading memories from older family members might put a spanner in the works, but certain date related world events or local happening might make it easier to pin-point a more or less exact date of an event.
Drawing up a basic family tree, starting with yourself and working backwards is actually quite easy to begin. However, the further back in history your findings take you, the more the information may become sketchy and harder to put into a working order. A large number of genealogy websites and software programmes are available for the novice and experienced genealogist. The working framework of genealogy stills needs to be manually organised but applying the information to these computer software programmes will in the end organise it into a neat a tabulated format that can be accessed at anytime.
Genealogy, as far as the written records is concerned may have its limitations. What happens when you have researched your family history as far back as possible? Genetics and DNA testing is your next step. There are two methods to acquire the information you require. The first being ‘y polymorphism, which is basically the route of following the Y chromosome, and secondly, using a method called mitochondial DNA, which involves the analysis of DNA found in the mitochondria.
This as far as genealogy is concerned, may seem a little far to extreme for the average enthusiast, due to the high costs involved and the extremely long duration it would take to finalise the data, however, this is the only way to get the rest of the data that you require to make your family tree or data as complete as possible. This should not deter you from enjoying all the fascinating facts that you will discover on your genealogy journey, the likelihood of you having to use DNA testing might never become an option.
About Author
Author: Govindji Patel
Please visit my websites at:
http://www.myadstracker.com
http://www.newgenealogy.com
http://www.hot-conference.com
http://www.thenicheonline.com
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