Certainly, as we research, we learn about history. Unless all you do is attach records blindly, you can't help but learn something about the time periods you're researching. It exercises our ability to perform critical thinking. From evaluating records to creating a new research plan—critical thinking is absolutely required. We learn organizational skills. While not all areas of our research may be organized (ex: my boxes of as of yet untouched family photos), other parts are likely well organized (like how we title records or photos when we save them). We may learn bits about language. It may be how English was used in the past, principles of Latin used in church records, or taking time to learn a few bits about another language to help us with translations.
Genealogy tugs at our emotions. How can it not when we find a family tragedy or another child who died young? When we read an article about sufferings of war, we imagine how our ancestors and their families felt. As we work with DNA results, we may integrate scientific skills and methods to help us better understand our past. And we learn practical life lessons and skills. Whether it's from an old recipe we can still use today or how to reach out and communicate with DNA relatives—searching for our past is not done to the exclusion of our present lives.
It's not merely about facts—it’s about people. Our people. Exploring our family trees changes how we view ourselves, our family, our community and perhaps even our country. Undoubtedly, it also influences how we perceive our future. But there's more! Beyond the basic concepts we use as we research, there are other areas we may touch on as well.
We may learn about our family medical history through DNA and genetics. We might learn about health patterns and how our genetics have affected our family across generations. In some cases, we may learn health details worth discussing with a healthcare professional as we make medical decisions for ourselves and our families. Utilizing DNA may open scientific avenues we never expected to learn about, much less understand. We may learn we don't hail from the branches we expected. It may launch us on a path of personal discovery we weren't expecting.
Learning about our families over multiple generations may shed light on how they survived hardships and managed to thrive. Knowing this history may guide us as we find ways to cope with challenges in our own lives. If we're lucky, maybe we assimilate ways of the past to help us overcome the difficulties we face today—allowing us to thrive in our own right. As we read accounts of our ancestors (such as obituaries), we may see the positives in our family. We may also encounter news articles highlighting their very human flaws. We, like our ancestors, are complex. We, as they did, make difficult choices every day based on the specifics of our lives. Every day, we're creating the history our descendants will call theirs.
As we research, we learn how to adapt to changing technology. For many of us, more research now happens online than among physical records. More and more, we depend on digital records. Digital databases sound simple in theory, but they can be complex, and it can take time to learn how to best navigate this new digital world. We need to understand the basics of how to do simple searches, and hopefully how to construct advanced searches to eke out the secrets we're looking for. While AI may help us decipher old writing, we still need to learn how wills, deeds, property records and court records fit into each time period we research. AI may help us search large collections more efficiently, but we still have to evaluate the results. There have been numerous changes over generations, and how we interpret one record may be very different from a similar record in a different era.
We may jump from the current country we call home to an entirely different part of the world. Cities within our own country may be well known to us. But toss us into another country and those cities or broader areas are completely foreign. We may need to study maps or geography to understand key elements of how location affected our ancestors. We may delve deeper and study the history of an area. Or, we might trace migration patterns (these days made easier with data provided in conjunction with our DNA results). We may learn historical place data providing key insights into why our ancestors may have moved to a new land. We may run into areas absorbed into other countries, perhaps more than once. This helps us better understand records for jurisdictions no longer in existence.
More importantly, we start to understand where our leaf fits in the greater picture of our family tree. One of my favorite (often misattributed) quotes is:
“Ye cannot live for yourselves; a thousand fibres connect you with your fellow-men, and along those fibres, as along sympathetic threads, run your actions as causes, and return to you as effects.” —Rev. Henry Melvill, Partaking in Other Men's Sins (1855)
We start to understand how our lives are inextricably interconnected with those of our ancestors. Perhaps we start to feel as if we have become a part of them, or they a part of us. Connecting with our extended family as we endeavor to solve mysteries, answer questions and piece together the fragments builds a new kind of connection. Hopefully, these connections will continue into the future, expanding our overall sense of family. And perhaps most important of all—we find our sense of self. We start to find answers to the question: "Who am I, and where do I fit in the world I live in?"
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
Disclosure: I used ChatGPT to assist with a title and search description, and to review this post for clarity, punctuation and grammar. Unless otherwise indicated, the content and all opinions are my own.
