Teach Yourself

FINITE

GENEALOGY

The Current Family

Key Generations

john@mchale.com

You naturally honor your ancestors. Proud and grateful, you record their names and dates, and any hint of new data spurs you to search further.

Nevertheless, you are dubious. You are the official self-appointed family historian, and your hobby is continuous. Will your treasure be preserved, or forgotten? Value, you decide, requires for the family tree be kept alive.

The roots you’ve uncovered demand growth, which can always be gathered soonest from current facts. This is fortunate, because typically, a child or grandchild wonders, and grandparents like to be interviewed.

In geology two types of information compete: the historic and the readily available. Historic offers the challenge of tradition. In the other, available data on our living kinfolk may largely just be assumed. Yet the latter presents a vital record, a ready sum of persons having an identical direct descent.

Enjoy collecting both types of information and assist successors as well. Compartmentalize the available facts, while simultaneously pursuing the traditional goal – documenting a unique and longest unbroken trail to your family’s earliest ancestor.

You – like any individual-- possess a precise clan of parents, brothers, sisters, grandparents, children and grandchildren. These kinfolk, apt to increase, tally to a fixed, arithmetical total. They are your Finite Family, simultaneously your Current Family. For practical and consistent results, collect on it initially where vital data is most likely to be overlooked – the three current generations.

A standard structure is proposed, each of its three parts recognizing information fundamentals: (a) direct descent, and (b) relative availability. Various unusual kinships like half-sibling, step-brother or half-sister, may supplement the basic structure.

#1 CURRENT GENEALOGY – This movement phase is limited to three generations. Termed your Finite Family or Current Family, it contains an exact number (minimum SEVEN) of you and other direct descendants from one ancestor. Their genealogy includes and flows from FOUR grandparents. Required is at least an effort to confirm the following specific facts (preferably with interviews) on each grandparent or other direct descendant:

a. Date and Place of birth.

b. Parents

c. Brothers and sisters (at least, number of)

d. Occupation

e. Marriage, and year

When a first child is born for you or a sibling, there is a new finite total. Two generations "move up." Your grandparents join tradition and your parents rise to among the FOUR convenient for interviewing.

#2 SOCIAL-LATERAL GENEALOGY – In this infinite class are all closely related aunts, uncles, offspring of siblings, cousins, in-laws and additional other kin born in the three current generations. Each such relative is neither an ancestor nor direct descendant. The five certain facts that are required in Current Genealogy are only optional here because the facts, although informative, may distract from direct descent.

#3 TRADITIONAL GENEALOGY – Here are unlimited generations of ancestors - descendants and kin - preceding your grandparents. The goal: documenting proof of descent along the one longest trail in the infinite mass.

You and your hobby successors strive to isolate (typically along various surnames) the route from one of FOUR grandparents. The value that encourages your searching is attained – the Finite Family’s crown jewel, its earliest ancestor and year of ancestry.

copyright 2011  john@mchale.com

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