Hug wrote:
> Legacy handles both genealogy and family history very well in my opinion.
> But let's not get away from the accepted definition of terms to satisfy a
> personal situation - genealogy is NOT the study of relationships.
Genealogy
> is the study of pedigrees which are ancestral lines, i. e., blood lines.
The
> fact that many pure genealogists are unwittingly deceived by the apparent
> facts before adequate record keeping should not alter our desire for
> accurate genealogy.
The only place that I've been able to find that defines genealogy as
narrowly
as Hugh does above is in the dictionary. Britannica and and two
genealogists
I read have different def'ns. Val Greenwood writes in "The Researcher's
Guide
to American Genealogy" that Genealogy is research, as opposed to copying.
So according to him if you get a gedcom of someone's blood line with a
gazillion
sources documenting that it is indeed a blood line and you merge that into
your
Legacy family file, you're not doing genealogy. You're just copying.
Now he does allow that good genealogy does involve checking what research
has already been done, so I do find it a bit confusing. I think what he's
trying
to say, is that if you haven't done some original research, that is, if you
never
go beyond copying older genealogies, and gedcoms, then you are merely
a compiler of earlier work. He seems to be writing that one needs to do
some work in original sources such as censuses, city and/or church
records and/or interviews of family members to be doing genealogy.
He definitely appears not to explicitly emphasize blood lines all that much,
though it is implicit in much of what he writes.
My point is that there are a variety of definitions of "genealogy", and
that the distinction between family history and genealogy is unclear at
best. I've not been able to find a any kind of "bright orange line" that
says genealogy is this and family history (or anything else) is that.
And now that I've written this, I recall that some months back in a similar
context I went to the same sources and came up with the same findings.
jr
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