Lineage

“ The gens came into being upon three principal conceptions, namely, the bond of kin, a pure lineage through descent in the female line, and non-intermarriage in the gens. When the idea of a gens was developed, it would naturally have taken the form of gentes in pairs, because the children of the males were excluded, and because it was equally necessary to organize both classes of descendants. ”

“ The ancient law-givers attached, indeed, a very high importance to lineage, as is proved by all those restrictive laws on marriage, which were destined to preserve the purity of descent; but they set a far higher value on the patrimonial inheritance of ancient customs, institutions, doctrines, and intellectual qualities, as constituting the true essence of national character, and determining the rank which one race should hold above another. ”

“ Indian-wise, his parents had arranged a suitable marriage for him, selecting a girl of his own tribe, of the correct clan to mate with his own, so that the line of blood heritage would be intact, and the sons of the next generation would be of the "Blood Royal," qualified by rightful lineage to inherit the title of chief. ”

“ Of plebeian lineages I have nothing to say, save that they merely serve to swell the number of those that live, without any eminence to entitle them to any fame or praise beyond this. From all I have said I would have you gather, my poor innocents, that great is the confusion among lineages, and that only those are seen to be great and illustrious that show themselves so by the virtue, wealth, and generosity of their possessors. ”

“ The rest have their praise in this alone, that they held aloof from the sin. Turn to other tribes, Zebulun, Asher, Naphtali, for instance, and in the case of each the names of those who were heads of families are given. In the First Book of Chronicles the genealogy is extended, with various details of settlement and history. In what are we to find the explanation of this attempt to preserve the lineage of families, and the ancestral names? If the progenitors were great men, distinguished by heroism, or by faith, the pride of the descendants might have a show of reason. ”

“ And was is correct in my eyes is that he returned now and began with the father of the lineage, as the custom of the scripture to return by the men of degree to the head of the lineage. And so in Chronicles (1 1:17-18) it is written: ... ”

“ More than once I have tried to picture myself in the position of a boy or man with an honoured and distinguished ancestry which I could trace back through a period of hundreds of years, and who had not only inherited a name, but fortune and a proud family homestead; and yet I have sometimes had the feeling that if I had inherited these, and had been a member of a more popular race, I should have been inclined to yield to the temptation of depending upon my ancestry and my colour to do that for me which I should do for myself. ”

“ Within a clan, or gens, everyone was, or was supposed to be, descended from a common ancestor, and thus related to all the others—in the former the line of descent being traced through the female, and in the latter, through the male. ”

“ The natural way in which a tribe is formed is from a family or group, which in time increases and divides into many households, still recognizing one another as kindred, and this kinship is so thoroughly felt to be the tie of the whole tribe, that even when there has been a mixture of tribes, a common ancestor is often invented to make an imaginary bond of union.82
The gens, until a comparatively recent time in the history of the human race, was composed of a female ancestor, all her children and all the children of her daughters, but not of her sons. ”

“ If by direct proof of an unbroken descent a full pedigree is made out, or if, when some link is wanting, the collateral proof from strong family or race resemblances is sufficient to warrant the belief that the link once existed, we might accept it as a fact that the individual descended from the supposed ancestors in a direct line, or that some peculiarity of blood came into his constitution at some point in the descent of individuals from individuals. ”

“ But although it might be allowable, in making out the descent of an individual man or any other animal, from a certain ancestor or pair of ancestors, to aid the pedigree by strong family or race resemblance, even when a link is wanting, it could only be for the purpose of establishing a pedigree, a connection of lives with lives, that such collateral evidence could be resorted to. ”

“ An Indian tribe is composed of a number of kinship groups or clans. To each one of these, speaking generally, belongs the hereditary duty of performing a certain rite and also the care of the sacred objects connected with that rite. Each kinship group or clan has a set of personal names, all of which refer to the rite peculiar to the clan, or to the sacred objects or to the symbols connected with the rite, and one of these names is given to each person born within the clan. ”

“ Throughout all the earlier stages of culture, and even into the civilized period, we find society organized with the clan for its ultimate unit, although in course of time its character becomes greatly altered by the substitution of kinship in the paternal, for that in the maternal line. By (p. 061) long-continued growth and repeated segmentation the primitive clan was developed into a more complex structure, in which a group of clans constituted a Phratry and tribe. phratry or brotherhood, and a group of phratries constituted a tribe. ”

“ Evidence from the Gens or γένος.—There is no more puzzling topic in the history of the ancient world than the origin and nature of the community called by the Romans the gens, and by the Greeks the γένος. To the present writer it seems that no existing community of men, neither totem kin, nor clan, nor house community, nor gotra, precisely answers to the gens or the γένος. Our information about these forms of society is slight and confused. ”

“ Turning to the influence of heredity, we recognized that by it are determined all the most fundamental features of each race and type of man, and that often the individual reverts to the traits of the one or the other of his parents, or of his remote ancestors, in such manner that one trait may belong to one ancestor, another to another. ”

“ When you can trace back the ancestry of any man we bring you with what you call negro characteristics, tell us who his father and grandfather were, and so on, until you reach one of your negro immigrants—when you can do this with all our inhabitants, and show us that every man with these characteristics is the descendant of one of these immigrants, and that every man with European characteristics has some of the blood of one of your European immigrants in his body, you may claim that you have given us scientific proof of your hypothesis. ”

“ Names of this class are generally retained by men and women throughout life and, to a degree, are regarded as sacred in character. These names have also a social significance, as they always indicate the birth status of the person, for the name at once shows to which clan or kinship group the bearer belongs. No one can exchange his clan or birth name, any more than he can change his sex. ”

“ We will begin with the gens, or the lowest division of the tribe. We must understand its organization before we can understand that of a tribe, and we must master the tribal organization before attempting to learn the workings of the confederacy. To neglect this order, and commence at the top of the series, is to make the same mistake that the older writers did in their studies into this culture. A gens has certain rights, duties, and privileges which belong to the whole gens, and we will consider some of the more important in their proper place. ”

“ As generations multiply, the more distant relations split off into other clans, and these clans, which have not lost the sense of primitive kinship, unite once more into tribes. The tribes again, as civilization advances, acknowledge themselves to be subjects of a king, in whose veins the blood of the original family runs purest. ”

“ And then, where larger populations arise, and different stocks are locally mingled, there are formed such groups within groups as those constituting, among the Romans, the family, the house, and the tribe: common ancestry being in all cases the bond. ”

“ There had been a wondrous involution from centuries of great history, according to subtle, silent laws of hereditary inheritance, in very blood and life, of tone, and quality, and temper, and now there is evolved, evoked, just that of power which tells of kinship with those who have gone before. ”

“ Kind Determined by Origin.—It is inheritance in the sense of community of origin that determines whether a given living creature shall be man, beast, bird, fish, or what not. A given individual is human because his ancestors were human. In addition to this stock supply of human qualities he has certain well-marked features which we recognize as characteristics of race. That is, if he is of Anglo-Saxon or Italian or Mongolian parentage, naturally his various qualities will be Anglo-Saxon, Italian, or Mongolian. ”

“ The gens embraces a part only of the descendants of a supposed common ancestor, and excludes the remainder; it also embraces a part only of a family, and excludes the remainder. In order to be a constituent of the gens, the family should enter entire within its folds, which was impossible in the archaic period, and constructive only in the later. ”

“ The governments of the various nations were based on the system of clans, gentes or totems, which was common not only in America, but in most primitive communities. Each gens had a right of representation, and the land belonged to its members, not as individuals, but as parts of the clan. ”

“ These divine nations, with their many successive generations and dynasties, constitute a single family; they are all inter-connected and spring from common sources, and where the literature permits us to see more clearly, the earlier races exhibit a common character. Like a human clan, the elements of this divine family grew and died, and shed forth seedlings which, in time, over-grew and killed the parent stock. ”

“ If we assume the family as the primitive fact which, by its increase, produced the clan, and afterwards, more complex aggregates, such as tribes, connected with each other by the memory of a common ancestor and at last subject to the authority of a patriarch-king, the social development is simply an expansion of the natural family. ”

“ In those organic individuals, of which we know that they are descended from one and the same common form of ancestors—in which, therefore, their common ancestry is empirically proved—there can be no doubt that they belong to one species, whether they differ much or little from one another, or whether they are almost alike or very unlike. ”

“ Since the features of the parent tribe are handed down from one generation to another, there is nothing more natural than that we should retain the historical features of our ancestors, viz., the stamp of gravity which the events of their time impressed upon their faces. ”

“ Strong hereditary dispositions of character may be recognized in early infancy. When the ancestry of a man is well known the roots of his recent phylogeny may be traced to his ancestors. Here we observe the effect of crossing between varieties or different races, or on the contrary that of consanguinity. ”

“ The amount of difference between the several groups—that is the amount of modification which each has undergone—is expressed by such terms as genera, families, orders, and classes. As we have no record of the lines of descent, the pedigree can be discovered only by observing the degrees of resemblance between the beings which are to be classed. ”

“ The remotest known ancestor of each compounding group, at once the most ancient father and the god of the compound group, being continuously represented in blood, as well as in power, by the eldest descendant of the eldest, it happens that this patriarch, who is head not of his own group only but also of the compound group, stands to both in a relation analogous to that in which the apotheosized ancestor stands ”

“ Looking for some explanation of this, we may find a key in the known customs of various Indian tribes, and the lower races of men. It is known that a tribe of Indians is divided into smaller bands, which are called gens or clans. A gens may consist of several hundred persons, but it is the unit of organization. It takes the place of a family among civilized people. ”

“ The division of society into clans.—Marriage laws depend on the conception that these clans descend from certain plants, animals, or inorganic objects. There was the belief in human descent from animals and kinship and personal intercourse with them. ”

“ 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. ”

“ When a man married he went to live with the clan of his wife. In the course of time groups of clans came to be called tribes.
[Pg 133] The Development of Transportation
A long time later, after the animals had been domesticated [Pg 134] and men had come to own flocks and herds and other things that we call property, the father became the head of the family, as we know it today. Our kind of a family with the father as its head existed before history began.
Words had to be invented, just as tools were. At first men had no language. ”