Genealogy in the Modern World

Never before has genealogy been easier than it is today, and never has it been more difficult than it will be tomorrow.

I’ve seen over the past ten years the rise of school projects focusing on genealogy, while I think I only ever had to do one, my sister (seven years younger) has had to do many, each one more intricate, complex and deep than the last. But I don’t think ten years from now there will be nearly as many of these projects assigned.

The reason:

Genealogy as it is currently understood and practised today just isn’t capable of keeping up with the modern family.

Multiple marriages and children from multiple partnerships will and already are beginning to make it impossible to track down cousins, aunts, uncles and even sometimes parents on the basis of surname alone – especially where a divorce or death and remarriage has caused family to fall out of touch with the children of family members. The ease with which individual family members, and even whole sections of families move across the globe, often only staying put for a few years at a time, further complicates matters. A decline in participation rates for organized religion makes church records, the old staple of genealogical research, increasingly useless for finding members from the previous two generations. Old family rifts become unnavigable torrents when dealing with all of these challenges.

Yes there is Facebook, Twitter etc. and a plethora of online communities capable of keeping you in touch with family members – but the fact remains that they can’t keep someone in touch with family members they do not know about. While certainly I know more about where my cousins are in the world, and even who they are dating (more than my parents do) , these are generally close relations, or second cousins that I (or my parents) grew up with and know very well, certainly family members for whom the genealogical information would be readily available.

The challenges that my generation will face in terms of doing genealogical research should our children be assigned such homework, do not need to make us throw away genealogy all together. Rather, it should be taken to mean that those interested in doing this research should work with our parents and our grandparents to pull our family trees together now, before things get too complicated. As we age, we need to allow the family tree to be a living, breathing document, updated as things happen rather than after each generation has passed.

There also needs to some guidelines established for how to deal with all of the new (and wonderful) kinds of families that exist today so that people do not fall through the cracks (unless they want to). Though I’m not sure exactly what these guidelines should be, I reiterate that the old model of mother+father=all of the children simply will not work in 20 or 30 years, if it even works today. One thing genealogy must be willing to accept is that it will likely be governed by love rather than blood-ties and while many will argue that this change would destroy genealogy’s core, I think I’d welcome it. It will be less biological most certainly, but I suspect it will be more accurate in terms of capturing the family relationships that are most important to individuals.

De-stable-izing Modern Relationships

I’m not sure whether this is just something that occurs among my groups of friends or it’s a generational thing more generally, but I’ve noticed a peculiar trend in Gen Y romance – no one ever really breaks up. Sure couples split and the individuals go on to date other people, but the old relationship is always lurking in the shadows.

It’s not just a case of a couple, or even multiple couples, splitting up and getting back together with each other. We all know couples like that and most of them have been that way since middle school. This is something different. That the old relationship has never truly finished doesn’t prevent one of the partners from going out and starting a new relationship with someone else and never quite finishing that one completely either.

What happens is over time rather than having one great overcome-all-the-odds-romantic-comedy relationship, is that individuals build up what can be considered a stable of romantic partners. Not too many – two or three, maybe even four (anything above that is starting to get slutty), but a few that can be picked from to suit one’s needs at the time. It’s like how a horse farmer might have a horse for show, a horse for working, one for racing and one for jumping. (Sorry for the length of that description of horse talents I needed to avoid saying ‘one for riding’ as that would likely have been interpreted as much less PG than I intended)

So, instead of one great love, it is entirely possible that someone may love multiple people at the same time. The strengths and weaknesses, likes and dislikes of each partner are known and can be accounted and compensated for. These relationships prove true the old adage of ‘better the scary you do know than the scary you don’t know’. While this approach to relationships seems, for lack of a better word, efficient, I can’t help but wonder what the long term consequences of this may be.

I don’t predict the laws on bigamy to be changed anytime soon, so does this mean that there is a whole segment of society that will never get married or ‘settle down’ in the traditional sense? Is this settling even important? Will this inability to make a firm commitment begin to permeate other areas of life – friendships (fair-weather friends to become the only kind of friends?), jobs, location. Will knowing that you have other more suitable options ready as soon as something fails to suit our immediate needs sabotage our future and turn people into total flakes?

I really hope not. There’s a lot to be said in favour of commitment and loyalty, of knowing where you stand with other people. I still think people are happier when they don’t need to constantly worry about becoming just another horse in the stable.