Family History - Introduction

Introduction

While genealogy is the early label for the field, family history is the overarching and more established term, since genealogy in the strict sense is only concerned with tracing unified lineages. Prior to 1980-1990, you will not find the term Family History used when discussing genealogy. Other sectors of family history, such as one-name studies, may pay only rudimentary attention to lineages, or may emphasize biography rather than vital data.

Forms of family history research include:

• genealogy (tracing a living person's pedigree back in time from the present, or a historic person's descendancy to the present, using archival records)
• genetic genealogy (discovering relationships by comparing the DNA of living individuals);
• one-name studies (an investigation of all persons with a common surname)
• one-place studies (population histories including the German Ortsfamilienbuch)
• heraldic and peerage studies (inquiries into the legal right of persons to bear arms or claim noble status)
• clan studies (inquiries into groups with a shared patrilineal or matrilineal connection to a tribal chieftain and his servants, although they may not be related by blood and may not share the same surname)
• family social and economic history (telling the story of a family's place in society or economic achievements using oral and written records, or inferring information about lives from wider historical sources; this subject is treated below)
• oral history or recording individuals' history to leave to future generations

Unlike related forms of micro-history, such as corporate histories or local studies, family history research begins with only an approximate notion of the extent of the entity - the extended family - and never fully defines it, since the early origins of all families become invisible in prehistorical times. DNA genealogy offers some hope of moving this boundary further back into time.