Ask Not What a Genealogist Can Do For You
Ask How I'm Going to Turn this Subheading into a Joke
No one has paid me to do their genealogy in the last ten years. So take this as you will. I’m out of touch. But not that out of touch. I still work on family trees for friends. And every year, it gets a little worse.
AUDIENCE: What gets a little worse?
ME, FEIGNING SURPRISE: Why, the internet of course.
EXEUNT, PURSUED BY BEAR
Why You Don’t Need a Genealogist
Here’s the situation today. If an (American or Canadian) friend has a readily traceable family tree, it’s probably already been traced.1 Just plug in the grandparents’ names and reap the bounty. Every family has a researcher, even if they lost interest after a few months. Maybe we don’t all have siblings, or even first cousins. But we surely have second and third cousins, and it only takes a few near-ish relations with the heritage itch to map out most of the tree.2 You’re only a few generations away from someone else’s work.
I am that person for my own genealogy. If a second cousin I’ve never met decided to nose around, most of the information she finds online about our shared family stems from my original research. I uploaded my first online tree about a quarter century ago. I happily admit that a lot of my work was cribbed from earlier generations of genealogists, the ones who compiled giant books and painstakingly mailed pedigree forms via Wells Fargo stagecoach. But—especially for more recent generations—I was the first to put it online.
As I’ve said elsewhere, genealogy is a scarce resource. It’s not quite as scarce as land. They are making new ancestors. But not nearly fast enough. And those new ancestors—you know, us—we’re not going to be a blast to research. Many American children born today, right now, while you’re reading this, are instantly locked into an existing genealogical matrix. There will be no “genealogy” to do on them. There won’t even be data entry. They pop out with their family trees fully formed.
There is a long tradition of comparing the past to a written book. The ink is dry. With genealogy, that is increasingly, literally (pun intended), true. I could hand my own children the books of their family trees. And yes, there’d still be work to do. But those would be some hard genealogical problems. That’s no way to get a kid into genealogical research.
Say you don’t know the first thing about your family tree. But you’re interested, you’re American, and your friend is a nerd. Say that friend is me. Fifteen years ago, you would give me some names, and I would start researching. Maybe two or three of your great-grandparents would show up on existing online family trees (Ancestry, Rootsweb, FamilySearch, etc). For the rest I’d be starting from scratch. As I traced them back, I would begin seeing other ancestors in existing online trees, maybe finding them in a Victorian genealogy compilation. If your ancestors all immigrated to America in the 20th century, or even post-Civil War, there’d probably be nothing at all. Even colonial coverage would be patchy.
In short, I’d have some real work to do.
Same thing today? I would type in your grandparents’ names, maybe some estimated birth years, and the internet would spoon feed me (sloppily) the entire family tree.
And then what? I print it out and hand it over?
No. Actually You Do Need a Genealogist
Genealogists, professional or otherwise, have something to offer. We have an eye. We have expertise. We know right from wrong. We have been doing this long enough that we can tell, pretty much at first glance:
Is this parent/child connection plausible?
Is this move across the country plausible?
Did someone merge two separate people with the same name? One in the old country, one in the new?
We can immediately identify red flags, like:
The family tree seamlessly traverses regions and eras with very scant record coverage (e.g., frontier New York, the early colonial South).
English ancestors are born in Massachusetts in 1615.
Ancestors have middle names in 1700.
Surnames transform for no apparent reason.
Gentlemen beget farm laborers.
Ancestors show up in radically different places over very short time periods (i.e., Ancestry Hint Syndrome).
And more! Sometimes it just looks wrong. Imagine your ancestor table is a dining table. Built of rustic hickory, not rustic hicks.3 A master carpenter can tell right away if it was poorly made.
If you’re interested in your family history but not interested in doing the work (i.e., you are definitely not reading this right now), a genealogist has a lot to offer you. When a genealogist gives you your family tree, you can trust in it. It’s not going to crumble at the slightest pressure.
But.
The data avalanche has made genealogy a lot easier for the rank beginner. But a lot harder for the serious researcher. Because, frankly, it’s not fun anymore.
If you’re a certain kind of person, it’s fun to start from scratch, not knowing what’s around the corner. Solving the puzzle. In 2024, rarely are we given the gift of the blank slate. Now we get a big, messy blob of completed work, some accurate, some not. Many have had their hands in it, most of them anonymous. Our mission isn’t to build the table. It’s to take it apart and fix it. Maybe that’s fun too, but it’s a whole different kind of fun. Not my kind.
If this were a temporary situation, I wouldn’t waste my time bemoaning it. There’s plenty of great genealogy to do. Whole parts of the world barely researched. Great mysteries of the past only now solvable as even the most arcane archival sources become accessible.
It’s not temporary, though. It’s the end state of genealogy. And the end is nigh.
This is increasingly also the case for Latin America, and even continental Europe, where people famously don’t care about their genealogies.
Don’t have any second cousins? Third cousins?? Please get in touch. I’m fascinated.
I’ve got more. White pine, not white people. Walnut, not a wall of nuts. Pine, not pioneers. Alder, not elders. In the unlikely event that you would like to use one of these dazzling witticisms, I ask that you please do not credit me.
I disagree that future generations won't have any genealogical challenges. A big part of genealogy is compiling biographies and stories about one's ancestors, not simply tallying up names and dates. No one ever learned history because they wanted to memorize a long string of dates, but because they weres fascinated by *people*. I am fascinated by my ancestors' lives and I have questions that may not be answerable: I have several lines from Colonial Maryland that trace back to Royalist and even Catholic Recusant families in England -- and then became Quaker within 50 years of being in America. I find myself wondering to what extent their political and religious views played in their immigration (and it's not simply Maryland was started to be a safe haven for English Catholics because one of the lines was Anglican and assisted in the Puritan attempt to take over Maryland, not converting to Catholicism until later) and why they eventually joined the Society of Friends.
Having just read a book which is basically the genealogy of American genealogy (Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America by François Weil), I think we're in the same boat as were genealogists in the past when cash-for-pedigree work was popular and profitable. People were so eager to "prove' their family heritage, and thus their status as rightful heirs of America's history/noble ancestry/colonial mythology/yaddyada that they didn't really care if their family tree was well-rooted or not. They just wanted the paper and stamp of approval.
Later, of course, serious genealogists had to step in to rewrite and correct all those documents and artificial trees, and I think we will see that in the the years ahead. The convenience of online research means people add all sorts of nonsense to their trees, collecting ancestors like it's a competitive sport, and replacing quality with quantity. It's a holy mess!
That's where we come in, and where, I think, genealogists will continue to thrive - in coaxing truth and order from the chaos, and then telling the stories, not as someone might want them to be told, but as the facts and historical context dictate.
Seriously, read Weil's book. It has changed how I see genealogy.