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People involve their ancestors in every aspect of culture. Individuals and societies worldwide and throughout history have incorporated ancestors into rituals public and private, religious and secular. Societies often organize their aristocracies, tribes, and other kinship groups around ancestral constructions which are defined through laws and customs governing marriage, naming, guardianship, inheritance, and other social practices. Medical professionals consider ancestral information important to a patient’s diagnosis and to the study of disease; many psychiatrists consider one’s relationship to ancestors important in understanding the mental and emotional disposition of subjects. Ancestry and perceptions of ancestry frequently function as a determinant of personal, ethnic, racial, and national identity. For all its larger philosophical, medical, psychological, and religious implications, one fascinating aspect of ancestry is how passionately many people hold to ‘their own’ ancestry, and to their own perceptions of the same. In Ancestors, David Hertzel offers an introductory foray into the nature of relationships people today have with their ancestors, and explores the significance of ancestry and ancestral belief in our modern world. Guided by two questions—“who are your ancestors?” and “what is your relationship to your ancestors?”—Hertzel interviewed thirty-five elders and people of prominence within particular social or intellectual communities. Interviewees were accomplished in an area related to ancestry, its nature or its meaning, and included genealogists, geneticists, tribal chiefs and elders, researchers in some aspect of family or ancestry, family elders, and experienced practitioners or supervisors of particular ancestral rituals. Interviewees were selected from a variety of cultural backgrounds for purposes of contrast, comparison, and breadth—but they are not spokespeople and were not asked to ‘represent’ particular belief systems, doctrines, or Peoples. Rather, the interviewees describe their own personal experiences and beliefs involving ancestors. From these interviews, Hertzel identifies common themes to ancestral practices and beliefs, such as the way we sanctify our ancestors, how we create a living narrative of our ancestry, and how experiences like suffering and love are shared across generations and appear to transcend death. Excerpts from interviews serve as examples throughout his narrative exploration of the concept of ancestry; a selection of full interviews are embedded throughout the text and offer glimpses into the diversity of ways that people think about who they are and where they come from.
Tracing Your Ancestors Lives is not a comprehensive study of social history but instead an exploration of the various aspects of social history of particular interest to the family historian. It has been written to help researchers to go beyond the names, dates and places in their pedigree back to the time when their ancestors lived. Through the research advice, resources and case studies in the book, researchers can learn about their ancestors, their families and the society they lived in and record their stories for generations to come. Each chapter highlights an important general area of study. Topics covered include the family and society; domestic life; birth life and death; work, wages and economy; community, religion and government. Barbara J. Starmanss handbook encourages family historians to immerse themselves more deeply in their ancestors time and place. Her work will give researchers a fascinating insight into what their ancestors lives were like.
In this companion to a new PBS series beginning in April, "In Search of Our Ancestors" features over 100 true stories of the amazing luck, unexpected kindnesses, and unusual serendipity encountered by researchers as they track down their family's records.
Noted social scientist Eviatar Zerubavel casts a critical eye on how we trace our past-individually and collectively arguing that rather than simply find out who our ancestors are from genetics or history, we actually create the stories that make them our ancestors.
This important book examines the motives that drive family historians and explores whether those who research their ancestral pedigrees have distinct personalities, demographics or family characteristics. It describes genealogists’ experiences as they chart their family trees including their insights, dilemmas and the fascinating, sometimes disturbing and often surprising, outcomes of their searches. Drawing on theory and research from psychology and other humanities disciplines, as well as from the authors’ extensive survey data collected from over 800 amateur genealogists, the authors present the experiences of family historians, including personal insights, relationship changes, mental health benefits and ethical dilemmas. The book emphasises the motivation behind this exploration, including the need to acknowledge and tell ancestral stories, the spiritual and health-related aspects of genealogical research, the addictiveness of the detective work, the lifelong learning opportunities and the passionate desire to find lost relatives. With its focus on the role of family history in shaping personal identity and contemporary culture, this is fascinating reading for anyone studying genealogy and family history, professional genealogists and those researching their own history.
Genealogy has long been one of humanity's greatest obsessions. But with the rise of genetics, and increasing media attention to it through programs like Who Do You Think You Are? and Faces of America, we are now told that genetic markers can definitively tell us who we are and where we came from. The problem, writes Eviatar Zerubavel, is that biology does not provide us with the full picture. After all, he asks, why do we consider Barack Obama black even though his mother was white? Why did the Nazis believe that unions of Germans and Jews would produce Jews rather than Germans? In this provocative book, he offers a fresh understanding of relatedness, showing that its social logic sometimes overrides the biological reality it supposedly reflects. In fact, rather than just biological facts, social traditions of remembering and classifying shape the way we trace our ancestors, identify our relatives, and delineate families, ethnic groups, nations, and species. Furthermore, genealogies are more than mere records of history. Drawing on a wide range of evidence, Zerubavel introduces such concepts as braiding, clipping, pasting, lumping, splitting, stretching, and pruning to shed light on how we manipulate genealogies to accommodate personal and collective agendas of inclusion and exclusion. Rather than simply find out who our ancestors were and identify our relatives, we actually construct the genealogical narratives that make them our ancestors and relatives. An eye-opening re-examination of our very notion of relatedness, Ancestors and Relatives offers a new way of understanding family, ethnicity, nationhood, race, and humanity. "An erudite treatise about how culture drives human cognition about near and remote relatives, Ancestors and Relatives offers lay and academic audiences alike a great read."-Science "The author examines how genealogical structures have been used to organize not only kinship, but also other domains ranging from Supreme Court justices to religions. Genealogy is 'first and foremost a way of thinking' and not simply a way to represent biological ancestor-descendant relations."-CHOICE "In Ancestors and Relatives: Genealogy, Identity, and Community, Eviatar Zerubavel, a sociologist at Rutgers, pulls back the curtain on the genealogical obsession. Genealogies, he argues, aren't the straightforward, objective accounts of our ancestries we often presume them to be. Instead, they're heavily curated social constructions, and are as much about our values as they are about the facts of who gave birth to whom."-The Boston Globe "Making the world seem strange is the first step to understanding it anew. Eviatar Zerubavel is a genius at doing this. Here he takes on kinship and shows us the profound, politically fraught, sometimes frightening, and often funny ways in which we take the biological fact that life creates life and fashion genealogy from it. This is a brilliant, witty, effortlessly well-informed book that anyone with ancestors or anyone who worries about ethnicity, race, and nationalism will read with pleasure and surprise."-Thomas Laqueur, University of California, Berkeley "While ancestors and relatives are genetically given, the genetics give us no clue how we should measure their relative importance to us. In this lively and well-written book, Eviatar Zerubavel avoids the aridity of technical kinship analysis and uses a personal perspective to show how humans fabricate, in the literal sense, their relatives, by a creative process of elimination and selection in the generation of rules. It is easily the most engaging introduction to kinship for the general reader that I have read, and a contribution in its own right to a wider understanding of our place in evolution."-Robin Fox, author of Kinship and Marriage and The Tribal Imagination "Kinship is a perennial staple-necessary but ordinarily dry as dust-of anthropology, sociology, and demography. In Ancestors and Relatives, Eviatar Zerubavel makes the topic new, bringing to it an encyclopedic knowledge and a powerful sociological imagination that brings to life the deeply social and cultural ways in which we talk about, imagine, and understand our ancestors and relations. Never has kinship been more interesting and never has it been as much fun."-Paul DiMaggio, Princeton University
"Honoring our Ancestors provides 50 stories that hold one common thread--the seemingly endless ways to creatively pay tribute to those who came before us. One man built a Viking ship and sailed across the Atlantic; another devoted decades to collecting slavery memorabilia. One family passed a diaper down through four generations, while another staged a scavenger hunt that helped family members get to know their ancestral hometown"--Back cover.
Fourteen artists and picture book illustrators present paintings with descriptions of ancestors or other sources of inspiration that have inspired them.
In the quest to uncover our family history, we turn to written records, the family album and even heirlooms. However, they can often be difficult to interpret and sometimes pose more questions than they answer: Why didn't my ancestors smile for the camera? Why did great-grandfather wear a beard while his sons were clean-shaven? Why is my great-grandmother holding flowers in this photograph? Drawing on evidence from social history, women's history, and the histories of photography, art and fashion, and using examples from the lowly as well as the famous, Ruth Symes explores many aspects of ordinary life in the past - from the state of the nation's teeth, to the legal and economic connotations of wearing a wedding ring and even the business of keeping a dog. This fascinating volume aims to help family historians get to know their elusive ancestors by deciphering the wealth of personal and historical clues contained in photographs, documents and artefacts.