Chapter 2:
Genealogy And The Search For Answers
The search for information about your family will be a process. It definitely won’t happen overnight and it definitely will take some time and research. But, that’s the fun part.
There are many ways that you can explore your family’s history through the use of the web and various other services that are available to you. Some may work, others will not. Often searching for your ancestry is a process of hit or miss. But, we’ll give you many resources to help you on your journey.
Genealogy And History
One important thing to consider is the fact that your ancestry is part of history. Even if you can’t get through the search for your family as thoroughly as you would like to, chances are you will learn a great deal about history and the role that your family may have played in that history. It could be small but it could be something important or something significant.
Sometimes, a search for your family’s relatives can lead to reunions, or meetings with others that you may not have known or haven’t seen in years. When you explore this path, you may find that distant cousins can offer you information. Or, you may find that a fight in the family has lead to a certain area of your family being cut off from you, and it may help to bring you all back together.
In addition to this, you may find that your family was separated for reasons that could not be controlled by them. For example, perhaps a war caused your family to split up. Or, foster home and adoption may have pushed your family into various directions that you didn’t know about.
The fact is; there are likely to be family secrets, hush hush memories and much more that you can uncover when you use genealogy as your tool to uncovering your family’s history and behaviors.
Indeed, you are likely to bring your family closer together and to have a better understanding for each other. And, for many people this means piecing back together family traditions and revealing family secrets that should have been told long ago.
Its Role In History
As we mentioned before, in family genealogy, there is a need to know more. Genealogy is actually something that people have done for centuries, if not longer. The need to know about your past is a natural, human curiosity and for that there have been numerous different people that have strived to learn as much as they can about their past throughout history.
Generally speaking, though, genealogy was something that was only done in olden times for those that were of power. For example, it was important to trace the genealogy of nobles, kings, queens and emperors. Any ruler needed to have information that showed that he was the right ruler for the job. Genealogy was used to help determine who the righteous ruler in many cases was.
If you wanted to claim that you had the right to have wealth and power, then you had to show that your ancestry proved that you were worth it. Demonstrating that you were the rightful heir or the rightful ruler was no little task and only genealogy could make this happen.
On a side note, the coat of arms of a family in the times of royalty where often used to help determine family lineage. This is actually called heraldry. It is the ancestry of royalty that was used in the quartering of the coat of arms of a family.
In many cases, though, modern ancestry studies have shown that many of those that used these methods to “claim” their righteous place in royalty where actually not authentic. They were merely fabrications that didn’t prove anything, really. The most notable of these, of course, are those kings, emperors or other rulers that used their ancestry to show how they were linked to gods and the founders of the civilization itself.
The fact is that genealogy is something that can only be traced through truth, and that is something that is in the eye of the beholder. While you can probably find documentation to support more modern claims of ancestry, going back quite far in time is difficult.
Nevertheless, it is a story that you can tell! Imagine begin able to say that your great, great, great grandfather was part of the Royal Family!
The search for answers, then, will start with the need for authentic answers. For that, we turn to modern methods of uncovering the truth of families, first.