The Family Tree By Terence L. Day Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. With Mother's Day just two weeks away, let's turn our genealogical attentions to the women in our families. Rebekah Manwaring, a Pullman High School senior, recently researched her female ancestors for a school project. She did a remarkable job of pulling together what her family already knew about its women, expanded on that knowledge through her own research and produced a notebook full of information and photographs that will be a legacy to her family. What a worthy project for any genealogist.
Family history is full of joys and sorrows.
For me, one of the sorrows lies in the obscurity and even anonymity of so many of my female ancestors. As practiced for many centuries, genealogy has been an exercise in male dominance. I haven't seen a pedigree in which males didn't predominate. Rarely do we find a male line ending with John, or William, or Robert, and no surname. It happens in patronymic lines where Swen's son is given a surname compounded from the father's given name, Swenson, and Tom's son is Thomson.