Restoring Ethics to Genealogy

To be a Responsible Genealogist is to be honorable, fair, and truthful,  

to show respect for your ancestors by presenting a true and complete picture of their existence,  

to be fair to your fellow genealogists by acknowledging their contributions to your research,  

and to be relentless in your pursuit of factual data and in the search for the truth.  

Barbara A. Brown

The Authors of our Existence

"A lively desire of knowing and recording our ancestors so generally prevails that it must depend on the influence of some common principle in the minds of men. 

We seem to have lived in the persons of our forefathers; it is the labor and reward of vanity to extend the term of this ideal longevity. 

Our imagination is always active to enlarge the narrow circle in which nature has confined us. 

We fill up the silent vacancy that precedes our birth by associating ourselves to the authors of our existence." 

Edward Gibbon (1737-1794) as quoted in The family of Early, which settled upon the eastern shore of Virginia and its connection with other families (1920)

The River Note

And I behold once more
My old familiar haunts; here the blue river,
The same blue wonder that my infant eye
Admired, sage doubting whence the traveller came,--
Whence brought his sunny bubbles ere he washed
The fragrant flag-roots in my father's fields,
And where thereafter in the world he went.
Look, here he is, unaltered, save that now
He hath broke his banks and flooded all the vales
With his redundant waves.
Here is the rock where, yet a simple child,
I caught with bended pin my earliest fish,
Much triumphing,--and these the fields
Over whose flowers I chased the butterfly,
A blooming hunter of a fairy fine.
And hark! where overhead the ancient crows
Hold their sour conversation in the sky:--
These are the same, but I am not the same,
But wiser than I was, and wise enough
Not to regret the changes, tho' they cost
Me many a sigh. Oh, call not Nature dumb;
These trees and stones are audible to me,
These idle flowers, that tremble in the wind,
I understand their faery syllables,
And all their sad significance. The wind,
That rustles down the well-known forest road--
It hath a sound more eloquent than speech.
The stream, the trees, the grass, the sighing wind,
All of them utter sounds of 'monishment
And grave parental love.
They are not of our race, they seem to say,
And yet have knowledge of our moral race,
And somewhat of majestic sympathy,
Something of pity for the puny clay,
That holds and boasts the immeasurable mind.
I feel as I were welcome to these trees
After long months of weary wandering,
Acknowledged by their hospitable boughs;
They know me as their son, for side by side,
They were coeval with my ancestors,
Adorned with them my country's primitive times,
And soon may give my dust their funeral shade.


Ralph Waldo Emerson
25 May 1803 - 27 April 1882

The Life of our Ancestors

Not to know what happened before we were born is to remain perpetually a child. For what is the worth of a human life unless it is woven into the life of our ancestors by the records of history. Marcus Tullius Cicero

 

The Family Scribe -- every family has one

My feelings are in each family there is one who seems called to find the ancestors . . . to put flesh on their bones and make them live again . . . to tell the family story and to feel that somehow they know and approve.


To me . . . doing genealogy is not a cold gathering of facts but, instead, breathing life into all who have gone before.


We are the story tellers of the tribe . . . all tribes have one . . . we have been called as it were by our genes . . . those who have gone before cry out to us: Tell our story . . . so, we do . . . and, in finding them, we somehow find ourselves.


How many graves have I stood before now and cried? I have lost count. How many times have I told the ancestors you have a wonderful family you would be proud of us? How many times have I walked up to a grave and felt somehow there was love there for me? I cannot say.


It goes beyond just documenting facts. It goes to who am I and why do I do the things I do.


It goes to seeing a cemetery about to be lost forever to weeds and indifference and saying I can't let this happen. The bones here are bones of my bone and flesh of my flesh. It goes to doing something about it.


It goes to pride in what our ancestors were able to accomplish. How they contributed to what we are today.


It goes to respecting their hardships and losses, their never giving in or giving up, their resoluteness to go on and build a life for their family.


It goes to deep pride that they fought to make and keep us a Nation. It goes to a deep and immense understanding that they were doing it for us. That we might be born who we are. That we might remember them.


So we do. With love and caring and scribing each fact of their existence, because we are them and they are us.


So, as a scribe called I tell the story of my family. It is up to that one called in the next generation to answer the call and take their place in the long line of family storytellers.


That, is why I do my family genealogy, and that is what calls those young and old to step up and put flesh on the bones.

Versions of this piece are found quoted on genealogy sites all over the internet. It is most often attributed to Della M. Cummings Wright.

I will reach back . . .

I will call to the past, 

to the beginning of time, 

and beg them to come 

and help me at the judgment. 

I will reach back 

and draw them into me, 

and they must come, 

for at this moment, 

I am the whole reason 

they have existed at all.

  

Memorable quotes for the movie, Amistad (1997)