What it's all about

Getting involved in your family's genealogy involves talking to older family members and asking them to relate to you anything at all that they can remember about the family. You record every detail. You may even need several visits to some of the older relations who tend not to remember details until after you have left and they continue to think about the family events that you and they discussed.

Genealogy research also involves finding birth, christening or baptismal certificates, and marriage or death certificates in the family. To make a start on your research you generally need your grandparent's birth certificates and marriage certificates. Even if the marriage certificate is not in your family's possession, as long as your parents know the names of their parents and the marriage date, the certificate is easily obtained from the Office of the Registrar of Births Deaths & Marriages.

A marriage certificate, in other words, is your link to the past.

Indeed, there is a vast variety of types and sources of information that you may eventually find yourself wanting to access in your genealogy research: things like parish registers, tax records, census enumerator forms, wills, militia muster rolls, military service records, tithe maps, electoral rolls, to name but a few. If you want to register your findings with the DAR then there are even more hoops to go through.

Gone are the attic-bound boxes of old family mementos. In their place are huge, organized, expansive family trees showing their male-line ancestors (father, grandfather, great grandfather, etc.) and the wives, brothers and sisters of these ancestors.

The best Internet source of genealogical information is the Family History Library of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints (the Mormons). There is an online catalogue (http://www.familysearch.org/eng/Library/FHLC/frameset_fhlc.asp) of this immense library, as well as Family History Centers which are branches of this library in many towns and cities throughout the British Isles and, indeed, the world where microfilm copies of most of the library's holdings can be viewed.

But there is more

Just collecting names and dates, however, can be a very sterile pastime even though this is what most genealogists tend to concentrate on.

You should aim also to gain information and an understanding of your ancestors and the kind of lives that they led. Even finding out about the locations and also the periods in which your ancestors lived will greatly enhance your overall understanding of your roots.

The term 'Family History' used to be regarded as synonymous with 'Genealogy' but that's not the case any more. A family history, especially with emotional overtones and documentation of repeating emotional patterns, is one of the hallmarks of the Bowen Theory of Family Emotional Functioning (http://www.thebowencenter.org/pages/theory.html).

I have been a student of this theory since the mid-1970's.

The study of the family becomes particularly interesting when you are able to discern repeating patterns: repeating patterns of divorce, of deaths by specific causes, of childbirths and stillbirths, as well as of sibling constellations and their relationships to human successes and failures.

The Bowen Theory addresses just these kinds of patterns in families and it makes predictions about the emotional functioning of future generations based upon certain identifiable patterns from the past. Patterns repeat; that is, after all, the nature of the beast. The genogram is one of the clinical assessment tools that helps us think systematically about how events and relationships are related to patterns of health and illness.

To quote from Bowen Center publications: "Bowen family systems theory is a theory of human behavior that views the family as an emotional unit and uses systems thinking to describe the complex interactions in the unit. It is the nature of a family that its members are intensely connected emotionally. Often people feel distant or disconnected from their families, but this is more feeling than fact. Family members so profoundly affect each other's thoughts, feelings, and actions that it often seems as if people are living under the same "emotional skin." People solicit each other's attention, approval, and support and react to each other's needs, expectations, and distress. The connectedness and reactivity make the functioning of family members interdependent. A change in one person's functioning is predictably followed by reciprocal changes in the functioning of others. Families differ somewhat in the degree of interdependence but it is always present to some degree."

Attention to such things is critical in any effort to discern patterns of family emotional functioning across the generations. The data is there, it just takes a little extra effort to ask the right questions and to get the FACTS that genealogists are so famous for. And then it takes a little more effort to put those facts into some kind of ORDER.

The facts speak for themselves

When family members get anxious about something the anxiety escalates by spreading infectiously amongst them. As the anxiety goes up certain family members begin to feel overwhelmed, or isolated, and soon symptoms of depression or relationship cutoffness erupt in them. These represent the most vulnerable and anxious family members, i.e., those more caught up in the family projection process.

These emotional lineages can be tracked down the generations of a family in the form of a family genogram, which is a visual representation of the family tree. It includes three or more generations and it shows how different family members are biologically and legally (and emotionally) related from one generation to the next. The genogram shows relationships amongst family members: the strength of ties amongst family members; patterns of illness and causes of death; types and dates of significant life events in family members; and significant life stressors for family members.

This information is portrayed in coded form and in a standardized way, such that important patterns can be gleaned. Basic data include, for each person on the genogram, name, current age or age at death (or date at birth and date at death), cause of death, occupation, marital/relationship status and history of same, and conflictual, overclose and distant relationships amongst family members.

The genealogist has access to exactly this kind of information -- they just don't know what to do with it for the most part. Consequently it is often discarded in the inquiry process.

That's where family systems theory can be of great help. It will extend your genealogy research into realms that will enrich your family today and for many generations to come.