Genealogy, Volume 6, Issue 1 (March 2022) – 23 articles

Family history research has seen a surge in popularity in recent years; however, is this preoccupation with who we are and where we come from new? Archaeological evidence suggests that ancestors played crucial and ubiquitous roles in the identities and cosmologies of past societies. This paper will explore how, in the absence of genealogical websites and DNA testing, kinship structures and understandings of personhood beyond genealogy may have influenced concepts of ancestry. Case studies from later prehistoric Britain will demonstrate the ways in which monuments, objects and human remains themselves created bonds between the living and the dead, prompting us to reflect on genealogy as just one aspect of our identity in the present. Full article

The family background of Agatha, the mother of Margaret of Scotland, is still one of the not yet fully clarified questions of Medieval European history. Here, the possibility that she could have been the daughter of Prince Imre, heir of the Hungarian throne, from the Árpád family and his wife, daughter of Romanos III Argyros, Emperor of the East Roman Empire, is discussed. Full article

Genealogy is one of the most popular sociocultural pursuits in modern U.S. history. During recent decades, scholars of the history of American genealogy and family history have forwarded an argument that its development since the 19th century is characterized by “democratization”. Surveying the scholarship, this article critically examines what that argument really means, what it unveils about historical change, and what it does not adequately recognize. The article argues that “democratization” is inadequate for making precise explanations about historical causes, causalities, and consequences. As an alternative to the democratization argument, it is suggested that research on the history of American genealogy should be inspired by recent studies of contemporary genealogy by sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural geographers, as well as by philosophical studies on the human longing for ancestry. By doing so, it becomes possible to engage with the crucial question of power in the historical inquiry. This approach is explored through the genealogical work of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. Rather than looking at genealogy through the lens of grassroots individuals, we need to acknowledge the connection between personal longing for ancestry and the ways in which powerful organizations, institutions, media, and businesses have sought to capitalize on this longing. Full article

This article examines the reach of Black Internationalism, a dialogue on race, politics, and modernity nurtured by Black nationalists in the United States, between 1971 and 1974. It focuses on Israel’s encounter with the topic and how Israeli political leaders neutralize its effects. Israel, one of America’s closes Cold War allies, faced three explosive movements with ties to the discourse and politics of Black Internationalism—the Israeli Black Panthers, the Black Hebrews, and the Jewish Defense League. Each group challenged the narrative of inclusion the nation cultivated since its inception. Israel’s ability to manage the crisis of Black Internationalism demonstrates the topic’s global reach in the final stages of the Cold War, but also its limitations. Full article

Much has been written about the representation of the Holocaust in Israel, but there is less awareness to its effects on attitudes toward democracy and the universal meaning of human rights. Representations of the Holocaust by Israeli socialization agents usually focus on hatred toward Jews, disregarding the broader theoretical-ideological context. This tendency is typical to groups that suffered such severe traumas in their past. Nonetheless, we argue that it does not allow a healing process and fosters a reduced perspective on the essential principles of democracy. It also particularizes the concept of human rights, thus excluding those of “others,” such as Palestinians. We further argue that a more extensive perspective on the Holocaust, which includes an understanding of Nazism within an ideological mosaic that denies democratic principles and humanity, may strengthen Israelis’ identification with democratic principles and universal human rights. We analyze the different approaches to teaching the Holocaust in the context of the collective trauma and explore their impact on society’s sense of victimhood and moral injury. The paper ends with a suggestion for further research that will explore the possibility that a school curriculum that emphasizes universal lessons will enable the memorialization of the Holocaust without succumbing to nationalistic perceptions. Full article

Direct-to-consumer DNA testing is increasingly affordable and accessible, and the potential implications from these tests are becoming more important. As additional people partake in DNA testing, larger population groups and information will cause further refinement of results and more extensive databases, resulting in further potential opportunities to connect biological relatives and increased chances of testers potentially having their identities re-aligned, reinforced or solidified. The effects of DNA testing were explored through 16 semi-structured in-depth interviews conducted with participants who had received their DNA test results. These participants came from diverse groups, genders and ethnic backgrounds. A thematic analysis found that notions of family were frequently challenged with unexpected DNA test results causing shifts in personal and social identities, especially in their family and biological identities. Discrepancies in DNA test results prompted re-negotiation of these identities and affected their feelings of belonging to their perceived social groups. Participants’ identities were important to them in varying degrees, with some feeling stronger connections with specific identities, thus having significant re-alignment of these identities and feelings of belonging. This article discusses the thematic analysis’s findings and explores how identities of the participants, many of whom took the test for genealogical purposes, were affected by DNA test results. As more people undertake DNA testing, it is important to explore how it may change the notions of family in the future and how their biological and family identities are affected. Full article

The decade after World War I has traditionally been defined as an “age of isolation.” The American public’s disillusionment with World War I, highlighted by the dismal failure of President Woodrow Wilson’s efforts to join the League of Nations, led to “A Return to Isolationism,” according to a brief summary of American diplomacy produced by the Department of State. Despite the fact that historian William Appleman Williams attempted to destroy the “legend of isolationism in the 1920s” and other scholars have followed his lead with a string of publications recounting the very active U.S. engagement with the rest of the world following the war, many textbooks continue to describe the 1920s as an age wherein the United States withdrew into a shell of isolation. My article suggests that one way of reconciling these apparently contradictory interpretations of American foreign policy in the decade after World War I is to examine one particular factor that has been largely overlooked: Whether “isolationist” or not, the United States during those years utilized race as a way to simultaneously build walls in and around the American nation as well as construct the ideological foundations for U.S. postwar expansion and engagement. Full article

Western medicine has an unfortunate history where it has been applied to address the health of African Americans. At its origins, it was aligned with the objectives of colonialism and chattel slavery. The degree to which medical “science” concerned itself with persons of African descent was to keep them alive for sale on the auction block, or to keep them healthy as they toiled to generate wealth for their European owners. Medicine in early America relied upon both dead and live African bodies to test its ideas to benefit Europeans. As medicine moved from quackery to a discipline based in science, its understanding of human biological variation was flawed. This was not a problem confined to medicine alone, but to the biological sciences in general. Biology had no solid theoretical basis until after 1859. As medicine further developed in the 20th century, it never doubted the difference between Europeans and Africans, and also asserted the innate inferiority of the latter. The genomic revolution in the latter 20th century produced tools that were deployed in a biomedical culture still mired in “racial” medicine. This lack of theoretical perspective still misdirects research associated with health disparity. In contrast to this is evolutionary medicine, which relies on a sound unification of evolutionary (ultimate) and physiological, cellular, and molecular (proximate) mechanisms. Utilizing the perspectives of evolutionary medicine is a prerequisite for an effective intervention in health disparity and finally dispelling the myth of the genetically sick African. Full article

In the ongoing and passionate debates over the digitalization of visual media, many questions about the ontology or materiality of the new digital image have been raised. Analog representation is often thought of in terms of indexicality and sometimes a naive belief in the truthfulness of the photographic image, whereas the digital image is, in a way, no longer an image anymore, but a set of data in flux, superficially coded and easy to manipulate. The following article examines how this shift to digitalization affects the ethical genre per se: the witness film. In a film analytical close reading of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah and Ari Folman’s Waltz with Bashir, resonances become visible to psychoanalysis, Deleuzian film philosophy and the debates over the materiality of the analog and digital image. Lanzmann draws on a specific kind of indirect indexicality, which is highly interested in the psychic and embodied realities of surviving, witnessing and the passing of time, whereas Folman develops a politics of the powers of the false: truthfulness, accessibility and memorability are abolished in favor of false images, screen-memories and traumatic mis/representation, which are staged noticeably digital and altered, revolving around the impossibility to grasp the ungraspable. Full article

The examination of demographic patterns and their variables is essential for our understanding of the anthropological and cultural processes that shape modern societies. Greek Thrace plays an important role in such analyses due to the cultural and socioeconomic variability it presents. This study is based on vital registration data of the 20th century, derived by various populations that inhabit the Department of Rhodopi, which are defined by discrete socio-economic, cultural, and historic backgrounds. We analyze and present various aspects of the social lives observed in these populations: marriage patterns, mean age at marriage of the spouses, mean age of mothers at first and last child, reproductive span, the children ever born, as well as other parameters related to reproduction. Our analyses show that several changes in marriage patterns have been undertaken throughout time, indicating an ongoing fertility transition. In that way, this study contributes to our knowledge on the anthropological populations from this part of Greece in relation to their socio-economic environment and it proposes possible analogies and differences that affected the evolution of the embedded populations. Full article

In genealogy, tracing names and dates is often the initial goal, but, for many, desire soon turns to learning about the embodied lives of those who came before them. This type of texture is hard for any genealogist to locate, but excruciatingly hard for those seeking to trace family histories that include ancestors who were enslaved in the northern parts of the colonies that would become the United States. Often, records thin to nearly nothing and frame all lived experiences through the lens of an enslaver. This is true especially of public records, created, maintained, and curated by the state apparatus. By adhering to the proposition that even materials that do not immediately reveal much about Black life may be useful if we consider what is missing and left out, this article suggests that these types of documents might help breathe some fullness into the individual and collective lives of those Black ancestors whose humanity the state denied. Emerging from a larger project to locate stories and histories of Black residents of one of the first colonized spaces in British North America, this article focuses on the ways in which the publicly available Massachusetts pre-1850 Vital Records—which have specific “Negroes” sections—serve as an unexpected source of useful, if fragmentary, evidence of not only individual lives, but collective histories of the communities in which Black ancestors lived. Highlighting creative approaches to analyzing these particular vital records, and centering women’s lives throughout, this article demonstrates what is possible to learn about patterns of childbearing, relationships between and among enslaved persons owned by different families, the nature of religious lives or practices, relationships between enslavers and enslaved, and the movements, over time, of individuals and families. Alongside these possibilities, the violence, limitations, and challenges of the vital records are identified, including issues related to Afro-indigenous persons, the conflation of birth and baptismal records, and differential access to details of the lives of enslaved men vs. women. Full article

Critical family history analyses have generated powerful insights into the history and ongoing workings of colonization by bringing to light forgotten family histories and reframing them as stories of colonialism. Such work unsettles the descendants of early colonizers by compelling them to acknowledge the ways in which they continue to benefit from the colonizing actions of their ancestors. My family were colonizers, and some not-very-distant ancestors were part of the first wave of “settlers” who dispossessed Māori of their land in coastal Taranaki. Where my family differs from the families of many writers in the critical family history field is that they remain almost to this day on the land first taken by our direct ancestors. The question I address is how these settler farmers deal with the fact that the land that is now theirs is only recently so, and only became so through acts of violent dispossession, and that the descendants of the original possessors of that land continue to live on the Coast. I argue that one way that settler-colonizers deal with this uncomfortable history is to erase it. The erasure of this history is accomplished through the simple but effective strategy of not-talking about it, which leads to not-knowing about it. This practice, I suggest is critical for the subjective security of settlers, and it remains a crucial strategy in ongoing practices of quotidian colonization. My analysis emanates from a critically reflexive exploration of my memories, of what I know and what I do not know about the history of the farm I grew up on, and demonstrates that autoethnography as a methodology is particularly useful for interrogating and breaking the silences about colonization that contribute to its perpetuation. Full article

This project examines how Turkish postmigrants in Germany position themselves against the influences of the German state’s integration and the Turkish government’s diasporic policies. We argue that the double influx of host and home states lures Turkish postmigrants into an identity trap subjecting their in-between position to exploitation in transnational negotiations. As their own perspective is poorly addressed in literature, this study fills this gap by reference to postmigrants’ standpoint. We hypothesize that the positioning of Turkish postmigrants in Germany is reflected through identity expressions and priority of belongings. We will carry out an exploratory assessment with three work packages. Study 1 will decode the Turkish postmigrant figure addressed by both states. Major media outlets most attended by postmigrants will be analyzed to display the imagined figure. Study 2 will inform the trajectory of the Turkish national identity narrative across important milestones over the migration chronology. A structured archival study will unearth the discursive mutations through political leaders’ speeches. Finally, Study 3 will exclusively confer postmigrants’ viewpoints against both influences. The project consults a conceptual framework in terms of diaspora generating, diaspora shaping, collective nostalgia, and social cohesion to expand on understanding how Turkish postmigrants express their identities and prioritize their belongings across their in-between existence. Full article

Anyone of African descent or with African ancestry who engages in a genealogy project soon learns that the U.S. Census is a helpful yet frustrating tool. In 2016, equipped with my history degree and an online ancestry search engine, I searched for my great-grandfather Leroy in census records after I saw a picture of him as a young man at work in Philadelphia. This image would have been unremarkable had it not been for the fact that my African American ancestor was so light skinned that he seemed to blend in with his co-workers at Kramer’s Fruit and Vegetables. I thought there had to be a story behind this. Classified as, “Mu”, for mulatto in most of his records, Leroy became “Black” on the census in 1930. My first thought was to question whether this categorization changed for other folks like him. My research led me to my master’s thesis “From ‘Mulatto’ to ‘Negro’: How Fears of ‘Passing’ Changed the 1930 United States Census”. Through this research, I also became closer to my father’s family. This piece will take you through this journey of discovery and my frustrations along the way. Full article

Wahi pana aloha ʻāina, storied places of resistance, is a historical and political research device that perpetuates contemporary Hawaiian sovereignty history, and can serve as a political intervention between Kanaka (Hawaiian people) and the State of Hawaiʻi. Wahi pana aloha ʻāina are places where movements and resistance in the name of aloha ʻāina occur. Aloha ʻāina is a founding quintessential concept to a Hawaiian worldview and epistemology. The genealogy of aloha ʻāina traditions, equipped generations of Kanaka with environmental keenness through a deep love for and connection to the land. During the illegal overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaiʻi in the 1890s, aloha ʻāina became the political identity of Kanaka in the struggle for sovereignty of Hawaiʻi during the illegal encroachment by the United States. In the 1970’s during the Hawaiian renaissance (cultural re-awakening), leaders of the Protect Kahoʻolawe ʻOhana (the group who organized the first contemporary resistance by Kanaka against the U.S.) re-discovered and reclaimed aloha ʻāina to re-awaken the Hawaiian consciousness after decades of imposed American indoctrination. The Hawaiian renaissance led to a series of land movements that arose in opposition to America’s control of Hawaiian lands and became the basis for the Hawaiian Sovereignty Movement, or, the current Hawaiian political movement for better self-determination and the return of Hawaiʻi’s sovereignty to Kanaka. This legacy of storied places of resistance has been effectively written over by colonial historiography and the State of Hawaii’s legacy of American expansionism. This has manifested into a legacy of prejudice in the State of Hawaiʻi judicial system that favors non-Kanaka entities, initiatives and agendas, while disapproving and discrediting Kanaka self-determination initiatives and sovereignty agendas. Due to this, there is no concern from the State of Hawaiʻi in remedying the political conflicts that arise between Kanaka and the State. I argue that the normalization of wahi pana aloha ʻāina, can assist Kanaka in overcoming the negative impact of the colonial footprint of the State of Hawaiʻi over Kanaka ancestral legacies and land histories, and be used to reclaim Kanaka land rights. In this paper, I lay out the research behind the theory of wahi pana aloha ʻāina, and how it functions as a research tool in the field of Kanaka land struggles, with a specific focus on historical colonial resistance. Second, I exemplify the use of wahi pana aloha ʻāina through telling the story of the wahi pana aloha ʻāina of my own moʻokūʻauhau (genealogy) in Keaukaha on the Big Island of Hawaiʻi, and how my family and community maintain our moʻokūʻauhau and kuleana (rights/privilege/responsibility) through the practice of perpetuating wahi pana aloha ʻāina. Full article

The article examines the beginning of the creation of symbols for the new raions (districts). In 2020, Ukraine underwent an administrative reform to merge most of the existing 490 districts, resulting in the creation of 136 new raions. We have proposed three options for solving the problems with the coats of arms and flags of the new districts. The practical implementation of these methodological developments is considered in the example of the Chervonohrad raion (the Lviv region). The symbols of this district were developed and approved in the summer of 2021. They managed to combine the symbols of the ancient historical land, and the current administrative center, and the old districts. Full article

Previous studies have indicated gender-based discriminatory practices as a result of son preference up to the first half of the 20th century in Greece. Demographic indices calculated from published vital statistics, such as sex ratios at birth and at childhood, were distorted to such an extent that certain scholars suggest that this distortion was due to sex-selective infanticide and neglect of the girls. Although we cannot exclude this possibility, the aim of this paper is to assess to what extent under-registration of female births (in the civil registration system) and under-enumeration of females (in censuses) accounted for the skewed sex ratios and to pinpoint that gender-based discrimination was not the same all over Greece. There were areas in insular Greece, notably the Ionian islands and the Aegean Archipelago, and one area in mainland Greece (Epirus) where demographic indices imply that gender inequalities were less acute. On the other hand, there were areas in mainland Greece, notably in Thessaly, where sex-differential mortality denotes extremely unequal treatment of girls. Full article

Family historians could increase their understanding of their ancestors and themselves and improve the mental health of living and future generations if they consider the psychological history of their forebears. Genealogists could then begin to recognize their family’s unique psychological inheritance that can appear as a result of trauma, depression, or addiction. The author explores three generations of a Parker family branch from Huntingdon/Norfolk, England, to show family historians how such considerations can shed light on their family’s psychological legacy. The author does this by introducing us to her great-grandmother Ann grandfather Walter, and mother Doreen through the lens of attachment theory, and their adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) such as poverty, bereavement, and addiction. Attachment matters because it affects not only how safe we feel, our ability to regulate our emotions and stress, our adaptability, resilience, and lifelong mental and physical health, but attachment style can also be passed on. In addition, this paper utilizes attachment theory to speculate on the likely attachment styles for the three generations of the Parker family and looks at the possible parenting behavior in the first two, the effect of alcoholism and the intergenerational impact of trauma and depression. Full article

Gaelic-speaking emigrants brought with them a massive body of oral tradition, including a rich and varied corpus of song–poetry, and many of the emigrants were themselves highly skilled song-makers. Elegies were a particularly prominent genre that formed a crucially important aspect of the sizeable amount of panegyric verse for members of the Gaelic aristocracy, which is a tradition dating back to the Middle Ages. This contribution will demonstrate that elegies retained a prominent place in the Gaelic tradition in the new world Gaelic communities established in many parts of Canada and in particular in eastern Nova Scotia. In many respects, the tradition is a conservative one: there are strong elements of continuity. One important difference is the subjects for whom elegies were composed: in the new world context, praise for clan chiefs and other members of the traditional Gaelic aristocracy were no longer of relevance, although a small number were composed primarily out of a sense of personal obligation for patronage shown in the Old Country. Instead—and as was increasingly happening in the nineteenth century in Scotland, as well—the deaths of new community leaders, including clergy, and other prominent Gaels were recorded in verse. The large number of songs composed to mark the deaths of community members is also important—particularly young people lost at sea and in other tragic circumstances, occasionally in military service, and so forth. In these song–poems, we see local poets playing a role assumed by song-makers throughout Gaelic-speaking Scotland and Ireland: that of spokespeople for the community as a whole. Full article

This article proposes a “genealogical” rereading of the concept of “populism”. Following the idea of “genealogical” analysis that was suggested by Michel Foucault, the aim is to show the “political” logic of the reinvention of the concept of “populism”, which was carried out between the 1950s and 1960s by the social sciences in the United States. First, this contribution reconstructs the history of the concept, identifying five different phases: (1) Russian populism of the late nineteenth century; (2) the Popular Party in the United States; (3) the Perón and Vargas regimes in Argentina and Brazil, respectively; (4) the reformulation carried out by the social sciences in the 1950s and 1960s; and (5) the subsequent extension of the concept to Western Europe. It is argued that the decisive turning point took place in the 1950s when the social sciences “grouped” the traits of heterogeneous movements into a single theoretical category. Full article

The potential for ‘historical trauma’ is deeply rooted within the evolved human mind, which constructs its reality through narrative in the shape of personally and culturally relevant stories. From its roots within psychoanalytic theory and practice and through its clear links with infant attachment, historical trauma can be theoretically linked with stress biology and the concept of Adverse Childhood Experiences. Via this trajectory, it has the potential to become more commonly drawn upon in the field of public health, despite inconclusive attempts to link it to social epigenetics. It is proposed that when the historical trauma narrative invades family histories via negative experiences that have deeply impacted upon the lives of ancestors, descendants may be drawn to ‘traumatic reenactment’ through fantasy. This is explored with reference to my own recently published novel, examining its content through the perspective of the ‘psychic work’ it represents with respect to reconciling the self to the traumatic experiences of ancestors. Full article