Genealogy is often called only a “hobby,” but in actuality, we genealogists structure the skeleton of a scholarly view of our migrant ancestors. What held communities together? Marital relationships, finances, religion, politics? According to anthropology scholar and genealogist, Carolyn Earle Billingsley, in her book Communities of Kinship, “genealogical methodology is essential to anthropological study.” (p.100) Her book tracks a cluster of families in the agricultural, antebellum South of the United States before and after the Civil War, but I believe her thesis applies to all of us, as we have migrated across America.
Billingsley used a thorough genealogical database of a set of families that relocated several times, from the Carolinas to Alabama, Arkansas, and Texas. The intermarriages of that set of families enabled them to do four things: provide for and protect themselves in new locations, acquire wealth and inheritances for future generations, educate their children, establish new churches, and gain political power. In our age, what vestiges of these forces of family and community unity remain? When adult children of a nuclear family relocate for career opportunities, marry outside the nuclear family’s religion or politics, and may not rely on inheritances for their own future, what remains to facilitate kinship? Is emotional affection enough?
Even though our smaller, old pioneer communities have been diversified and spread broadly across the landscape of our families, we can easily find remains of communal family forces. Often a retired generation moves to wherever adult children have located, to preserve that sense of family safety and unity. And now, our digitalized “hobby” promotes a basis for the scholarly study of kinship, and through DNA, patterns of health and survival.
~ Linda Johnson is a Board member for Larimer County Genealogical Society. Visit their website at www.lcgsco.org or their Facebook page at www.facebook.com/lcgsco to see our events and learn about genealogy