How Big is Your Family?
Most Americans know who their grandparents were, and many knew their great grandparents. If they are asked the names of their great, great grandparents, however, the vast majority of people will be unable to give an answer. If they do know who they were, then it is likely that they have either conducted or viewed a genealogical study of their family.
Genealogy is the study of family lineage. It traces the generations back through time, and then forward again to the present day. It can expand our knowledge of current relatives by revealing distant cousins that we never knew existed. For even as our family trees grows broader as we look backward in time, each of the old branches that we uncover grows equally broad as it approaches the present day.
Think about just a few generations back. Did your great, great grandparents have brothers and sisters? Did they have children? Did their children have children who also had children? How many unknown cousins come from going back just one more generation beyond that? If you remember that you had sixteen different great, great grandparents alone and that the number doubles with each further generation before them, you can see just how quickly the numbers mount up to thousands of cousins living in the present day, most entirely unknown to each other.
During the last presidential election it was said that Barack Obama and Dick Cheney were distant cousins. Before that someone discovered a similar relationship between John Kerry and George W. Bush. While it may take few more than six degrees of separation, many of us would be surprised at the number of famous or recognizable names to whom we are related if we performed a complete genealogical survey of our ancestry and the other descendents of our ancestors.
There are companies that specialize in conducting genealogical studies for a fee. These companies often have teams working on each project and can turn in results in a relatively short amount of time, often just a couple weeks. Fees may depend upon how many generations you want traced, or they may have a flat fee to trace back as far as they can. Often they will provide not just a list of ancestors, but a detailed report and an artistic rendering of the client’s family tree suitable for framing.
It is also quite possible to learn about the techniques of genealogical research and to conduct one’s own study. It often takes much longer to conduct the study by oneself. There may be a wait of days or weeks for a reply to a written inquiry which reveals only one more link in the chain. Those who do undertake their own genealogical review often find that it is not the end result so much as the joy of the process itself that is the most rewarding.
Either way, finding out the details of our family tree and the extent of our modern day relations can be an eye-opening experience.