Family History Blog Discover your Family Tree

Teaching Kids About Their Family HistoryPosted by admin on September 23rd, 2009

At first genealogy seemed like such a dry topic with its pedigree charts and shelves of dusty records. When I had the idea to teach my kids about it, I was a little worried. How could I make this topic interesting enough to hold their attention?

But then I remembered something important: family history isn’t really about records and charts. It’s about stories. More importantly, it’s stories about them, where they came from, where they got their dimples or their laugh or their wild streak.

So I fished out some old family photos and invited my mom to help me. As soon as we started, it was like magic. The kids sat in spellbound silence as if they were listening to their favorite fairy tale. By the questions they asked and they comments they made, I could tell they sensed that somehow these people were important to them, an aunt, uncle, or grandparent they hadn’t met before. I was actually amazed at how much they valued the stories. To this day, they like to bring them up and ask questions about them.

If you’ve been aching to share your family history with your kids, how do you plan to do it? If you’ve already done it, what tips do you have for the rest of us novices?

Does murder run in the family?Posted by admin on September 13th, 2009

Is it possible that a murderer could have inherited his thirst for blood from his family? For Diamond Blair of Baltimore, Maryland, that would seem to be the case. Blair, 33, recently implicated in the June killing of a robbery victim, is the son of a convicted murderer, the brother of an alleged murderer, and the nephew of one of the cities worst known serial killers, a man who killed six women in 2004. For Blair, this charge is only the most recent in a string of crimes which have become increasingly violent since his first arrest at age 6 for stealing.

Cases like these tend to raise questions about nature versus nurture. Does the Blair family suffer from a genetic disorder that makes them predisposed to violence? Or are their homicidal tendencies the result of their upbringing and the moral decay of their environment? If you have criminals in your family tree, does it make you more likely to go bad? We know that vices like alcoholism are passed down from generation to generation. Is murder?

What do you think? Nature or nurture? Fate or choice?
 

DNA changing the scope of genealogy researchPosted by admin on September 9th, 2009

I remember the first time I was introduced to a family history library, an intimidating mountain of filing cabinets, microfiche viewers, and ancient, DOS-based computers. It was daunting to say the least, especially to my patience. Researchers could look for hours at parish records and social security death records and come up with the tiniest of insights into your great-grandmother’s uncle’s resting place. The thought of tracing back my ancestry hundreds or thousands of years seemed nearly impossible.

Modern genomics and affordable DNA testing, however, are expanding the reach of family history research. With single DNA swab, you can trace your genetic makeup back thousands of years. You can find clues about your lineage that would be nearly impossible to find using records and gravestones. Most intriguingly, you may stumble across ancestries you never even supposed existed.

Case in point: in National Geographic’s recent special "The Human Family Tree," a man from Ghana, who had previously supposed his ancestry would be strictly African, found out he had just as much European blood. A wide number of Asians unexpectedly discovered Native American genes in their makeup.

DNA testing will likely become a way to give family history researchers a bird’s eye view of their ancestry. From there, it will be up to genealogists to track down the details.