Family tree

“ An amiable variation is the family tree. Usually one couple are appointed the original ancestors, if possible, a couple associated with an honorific event like the Norman Conquest. That couple have no ancestors. They are not descendants. ”

“ Domestic arboriculture is certainly getting into fashion, and a family tree is becoming quite essential to the self-complacency, at least, of many well-regulated families. The roots are found to push freely, in the superficial soil of family pride. ”

“ A genealogist, however, is not satisfied with a pedigree which cannot be proved, and if our pedigree-hunter thinks, either from the high qualities with which he is endowed, or from the knowledge of noble ancestors having adorned his family tree, that kings must have been undoubtedly numbered among his forbears—well, of course, he must make good his claim, perhaps even to royal descent in the male line. ”

“ Her mother was a Rutherford. The family came over in the ark, and were connected by marriage with Henry the VIII. On her father's side they date back further than Adam. On the topmost branches of her family tree there's a superior breed of monkeys with very fine silky hair and extra long tails. ”

“ Normally a child has two parents, four grandparents, and eight great-grandparents. Now, when cousins marry, the great-grandparents of the offspring are reduced to six. The mating of brother and sister cuts the grandparents to two, and the great-grandparents to four. Mating of parent and offspring makes a parent and grandparent identical and likewise eliminates ancestry. Inbreeding means the reduction of the number of branches in the ancestral tree, and this means the reduction of the number of chances to get variation, be they good or bad. ”

“ Fatherhood may pass through many stages, from a light flitting from one polyandric household to another, on to that form in which the several husbands of the female head of such households must be distinctly related to each other, but, through all the varieties of polyandry, the fixed stake of classification and localization of offspring defines the family outline. ”

“ Failing father or husband, the unmarried daughters were placed under the guardianship of the nearest male members of the family. Thus the family, in the narrower sense in which we commonly use the word, as meaning descendants of a common father or grandfather, was, as it were, a single point of growth in a larger organism, the gens, which consisted of all those who shared a common ancestry. ”

“ In reckoning the relationships between the collateral members of the family, one counts not generations or begettings, not removes or degrees, but ancestry or the number of ancestors, so that the father or founder of [422] the family only counts once. Thus his descendants Ad and Bd in the sixth generation or lifetime, are fourth cousins separated from one another by nine ancestors: that is, they are related in the ninth âch. ”

“ During the lapse of ages and in the absence of any written records, few genealogical trees could be traced clearly through all their ramifications, and the danger of admitting some strain of vulgar blood into a family imparted special advantage to marriages between children of the same father by different mothers. ”

“ When we trace the pedigree of a single man or any other individual animal back to a remote pair of ancestors, we connect together in an unbroken chain the successive generations of parents and offspring. If the chain is anywhere broken, so that direct descent can not be traced throughout the series, we can not by direct evidence carry the peculiarities of family traits any further back than the ancestor or pair of ancestors with which we can find an unbroken connection of life with life. ”

“ It should be remembered that if, instead of counting one man's ancestors, we should reckon one man's descendants, assuming an average, in each family, of three children who become parents, in nine generations some 9,841 descendants would have become parents, each with a wife or husband, making a total of 19,682 to appear in the tribal book, without counting descendants that leave no issue!
After the ninth generation the tribe grows with leaps and bounds that are truly mighty. ”

“ Nevertheless, from a genealogical point of view it appears that this rank is too high, and that man ought to form merely a Family, or possibly even only a Sub-family. If we imagine three lines of descent proceeding from a common stock, it is quite conceivable that two of them might after the lapse of ages be so slightly changed as still to remain as species of the same genus, whilst the third line might become so greatly modified as to deserve to rank as a distinct Sub-family, Family, or even Order. ”

“ Then we move into our new homes, which are much the same as the old ones, and we bring up a family of descendants for our husbands. When the husband dies, the eldest male child takes over the estate, and his wife rules in the mother's place. ”

“ He studied the genealogical history of numerous families of the nobility and found as a rule that in one, male, in another, female, descendants so predominate that the tendency toward inheritance of sex within a family can scarcely be called in question. ”

“ And in countries where certain colors distinguish certain families, and are hereditary, so to say, it is convenient and pleasant to recognize a coat-of-arms, or a livery, and to know that the representative of a great and famous family is passing by. ”

“ One of the most perplexing facts to the student of genealogy, in making out the pedigree of an important family from registers of births, deaths, and marriages in a parish, is that wherever a great family was seated, there are found also a shoal of individuals, [297] distinctly of an inferior social class, bearing the same patronymic. That these were no blood relatives is almost certain, for they are not mentioned in the wills of those belonging to the aristocratic family; and we find no evidence in registers or elsewhere of any family relation. ”

“ But it seems certain that ancestry will steadily play a larger part in marriage selection in the future; it is at least necessary to know that one is not marrying into a family that carries the taint of serious hereditary defect, even if one knows nothing more. An intelligent study of genealogy will do much, we believe, to bring about the intelligent selection of the man or woman with whom one is to fall in love. ”

“ I dwell a little on the process which is practically followed in separating them from the Cognates, because it explains a memorable legal maxim, "Mulier est finis familiæ"—a woman is the terminus of the family. A female name closes the branch or twig of the genealogy in which it occur. None of the descendants of a female are included in the primitive notion of family relationship. ”

“ Of these genera and species of families, those varieties which are found in advanced societies are the most coherent, most definite, most complex. Not to dwell on intermediate types, we see, on contrasting with the primitive kind of family group that highest kind of family group which civilized peoples present, how relatively high is its degree of evolution. ”

“ The male member of the family inherits, but he does so only as the son of a female member of the family through whom he may justly claim kinship, or, to put it in another form, a man's natural heir is not his son, or his brother's son, or the descendant of a common male ancestor, but his sister's, or his sister's daughter's son, or the descendant of a common female ancestress. ”

“ There are many such in all good libraries, a list of which will be given later on; but, while the search is in its infancy and does not go farther back than two or three generations, probably the Peerages (if the family is of social [Pg 7] position) , with perhaps certain other printed pedigrees and works on family history, such as Burke’s Commoners and Landed Gentry, should suffice for the present.
But the golden rule in genealogy should always be remembered; and, though the information thus derived may possibly be fairly correct, many details may call for verification later in the search. ”

“ In some there were four families—the grand-parents, the parents, the eldest son with his wife and family, and a daughter or two with their husbands and children. The eldest son, who inherits the house and land, almost invariably brings his wife to his father's house, where she often becomes little better than a slave to her mother-in-law. ”

“ Now it is clear that on tracing down each branch of the great genealogical tree, kinships would be much more manifest among the recently-differentiated forms than among those forms which diverged from one another in the earliest stages of organic life, and had separated widely before any of the types we now know had come into existence. ”

“ The beginning of society, it has been said a thousand times, is the family, a natural association of kindred by blood, composed of father, mother and their descendants. In this family, the father is absolute master of his wife, his children and the goods of the little community; at his death his eldest son succeeds him; and in course of time this association of kindred, by natural increase and by adoption, develops into the clan, gens, or γένος. ”

“ Family groups, consisting of mothers and such few children as can be reared without permanent paternal assistance, are necessarily small and soon dissolve: integration is slight. Within each group the relationships are less definite; since the children are mostly half-brothers or half-sisters, and the paternity is often uncertain. From such primitive families, thus small, incoherent, and indefinite, there arise, in conformity with the law of Evolution, divergent and redivergent types of families—some characterized by a mixed polyandry and polygyny ”

“ Success in the economic struggle of the family has always been conditioned upon the physical environment, and it will always remain one of the factors that shape human destiny.
31. Inheritance of Family Traits.—Another factor that enters into family life is the physical nature of its members, the quality of the stock from which the family is descended. Heredity is as important in sociological study as environment. It is well known that a child inherits racial and family traits from his ancestors, and these he cannot shake off altogether as he grows older. ”

“ Thus, a man will not only apply the term "father" to all the brothers of his father, to all the sons' sons of his father's father, and to all the sons' sons' sons of his father's father's father, to all the husbands of his mother's sisters and of his mother's mother's granddaughters, etc., but he will also apply the term to all the members of his father's clan of the same generation as his father and to all the husbands of the women of the mother's clan of the same generation as the mother, even when it is quite impossible to show any genealogical relationship with them. ”

“ And fortunate are those families who have a few generations recorded in the Heralds’ books. They are saved thereby a vast amount of research into miscellaneous papers, which, after much labour and expense, may yield data sufficient for the construction of a genealogical system, without security against error. The difficulty of recovering lost portions of family history is far [Pg 27] greater than is imagined by those who have never made the attempt. ”

“ If the whole of a family, such as is given in one of the genealogical tables, should die out, the inheritance of the buffaloes and other property is determined by the nearest links of descent, of which a tradition may be preserved, even if the actual relationship cannot be definitely traced. ”

“ Everywhere we find the tribes or clans composed of several families, the42 members of each family being more closely connected with one another than with the rest of the tribe. The family, consisting of parents, children, and often also their next descendants, is a universal institution among existing peoples.204 And it seems extremely probable that, among our earliest human ancestors, the family formed, if not the society itself, at least the nucleus of it. ”

“ The question as to how far immediate heredity is a cause of differences found between individuals, can only be answered by measuring how much more alike members of the same family are in a given trait than people picked at random, and then making allowance for similarity in their training. The greater the likenesses between members of the same family, and the greater the differences between members of different families, despite similarities in training, the more can individual differences be traced to differences in ancestry as a controlling cause. ”

“ Scarcely a home throughout the land but possessed one of these family heirlooms, on whose fly-leaf were recorded the births and deaths of the family sometimes for several successive generations, as it was no uncommon occurrence for occupiers of houses to be the descendants of people of the same name who had lived in them for hundreds of years, and that fact accounted for traditions being handed down from one generation to another. ”

“ When naturalists speak of Families among animals, they do not allude to the progeny of a known stock, as we designate, in common parlance, the children or the descendants of known parents by the word family; they understand by Families natural groups of different kinds of animals, having no genetic relations so far as we know, but agreeing with one another closely enough to leave the impression of a more or less remote common parentage. ”

“ In the family husbands and wives, parents and children are found, and sometimes grandparents and more remote kindred are included. In the gens consanguineal kinship is reckoned in the female line; in the tribe it is reckoned in both male and female lines, and ties of affinity are observed. ”

“ Restricted Areas of Families.—As families sometimes consist of single genera and even single species, they often present examples of very restricted range; but what is perhaps more interesting are those cases in which a family contains numerous species and sometimes even several genera, and yet is confined to a narrow area. ”