From: fr@compu.com (Fred Rump from home)
Newsgroups: soc.roots
Subject: Re: Royalty GedCom and GEDCOM program
Date: 2 Jan 93 22:03:59 GMT
Organization: CompuData Inc.

hiscrp@nuscc.nus.sg (C R Pennell) writes:
>: FR wrote
>: The vast majority of us are descendents of the ordinary rabble that roamed
>: this earth and had very little to do with the handful of noble savages among
>: us. Once we get back to our European lines we are lucky to find even the
>: tiniest shred of info about who most likely were our serf ancestors.


>Hm, I'm not sure about this. It raises a question about WHY people do
>genealogy anyway. You can see it in two ways, I think. As a way of
>collecting	information about how YOU got to where you are: that's obvious
>But also as a tool to build up a wider picture of the past.

I'm not sure with what you are disagreeing here. My point was that kings and
queens were very few among us at anytime. Sure they made kids out of wedlock.
Sure there is a better genealogical record available, but thru it all we
descend mostly from the folks who struggled thru life out on the farm. The
people who made food also made wealth and power for a relative handful of
their owners/whatever.

If we are to claim ancestry to Charles the Great (Charlemagne) we need to
travel thru roughly 40 generations of people. If we were to ignore
intermarriage of cousins and assumed a pure strain, we would require around a
trillion total ancestors. If we go back a bit further, say to Socrates, we
wind up with 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 ancestral lines. Oh, sure there
were some kings in there, but which percentage does that represent? One gene?
:-)


> Its pretty
>clear that at every level, and in any society you care to mention, that
>kinship connections were used to advance - or protect - economic social
>and political position. For a historian these connections are pretty
>important. Three examples"

I agree, but your ancestry of a few ancestor lines had a particular calling
which took them into specific life circumstances.  Very few people were in the
foreign service at any time.  And who were they before they reached such
plateaus?

All those other strains which we can't find are the nameless people who simply
came and went - we latch onto some we can find and call it our genealogy. It
may be much more on the nameless side. Ideally you would not track the males
anyway.  Umbilical lines would make a bit more sense being that the child is
fairly certain to have the mother's genes at least.

>people:  you should be able to pick and choose who you want in to a
>particular chart:  excluding "irrelevant" lines for the particular purpose
>of what you are doing without deleting them from the database.  Secondly
>you must be able to produce charts wich pick out particlar features:
>different families represented with different styles of line connecting
>them, ways of printing different sorts of boxes round different names:  so
>all the French come out with shadow boxes and all the Germans with Gothic
>ones etc.  or by profession:  churchmen in gothic (has to be!) traders in
>boxes made up of little pound signs, or (if you're lucky enough to use a
>colour printer) in different colours.

Yes, all that would be nice. It would also be nice to have one huge database
with all people who have ever lived in it.  It would be one hell of a tool.
:-)


>name, in a logical sequence, so that the top layers can be removed.  That
>sort of program would be a very powerful tool for historians, as well as
>genealogists who are collecting their own family histories.  And that is
>why, incidentally these royal genealogies are important:  the sort of links
>they make, where real, do help to explain what is happening now (look at
>the British royal family!) and where unreal (are the genealogies including
> Alfred accurate?) help to explain processes of legitimation.

Let's face it. Genealogy had its beginning with somebody wanting to show that
they were of better breed than their neighbor. No one ever sat down to show
that they really descended from the scum of the earth. The royal connection
bit is a part of the past interest in what genealogy was: the search for some
significance. In the development of a family history, the knowledge of history
via the royal lines would be shallow indeed.

Take a look at the living standards of that day of the vast population.
Research that. Write about that. It would really show our heirs how far we've
come as a society. The life-styles of our parents, their parents etc. are what
genealogy is all about - at least to me it is. It is the only thing that can
make history really come alive as if we were there.


>  And what I'd
>like is a genealogy, as large as possible, of those who claim descent from
>the Prophet Muhammad .  .  .	

Why?

Fred


-- 
W. Fred Rump 	office:	   fred@COMPU.COM     'mans feet have grown/so big 
26 Warren St.   home: fred@icdi10.compu.com  that he/forgets his littleness'
Beverly, NJ. 08010                          		Don Marquis 
609-386-6846    bang:uunet!cdin-1!icdi10!fr   
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