Genealogy Vs. Family History - Giving Your Ancestors Life - Researching Siblings

In all the years I have been doing research into the history of my family, I have been constantly amazed by the lack of interest I see in most genealogies for providing contextual materials that show anything about how their ancestors lived. From time to time I see stories about individuals, when people have been lucky enough to find a personal anecdote that has managed to make its way into historical records. I see wills, and deeds and land grants. Once in a while, I see a personal letter or journal entry, or a page from the family bible. But these instances are really relatively rare in the plethora of genealogies posted on the internet. Mostly I just see names, lists and lists of names.

To make matters worse, at least in my own humble opinion, the lists of names are often displayed in such a way as to make them effectively meaningless. You click on a name and you can get a person's parents names, or a child's name, but often they are so jumbled in a list on the page that you can't even begin to follow a line of descent in any comprehensible way.

Genealogy vs. Family History

This type of recording may be genealogy, but it is not family history. I personally can see no sense, and get no pleasure, out of knowing a list of names. I don't really care what my ancestors were called, I want to know what they did. I want to know how they lived, what they experienced, who their friends were, what they did for a living, what they cared about and what they disliked. I want to know how they were raised, whether they were happy, and what was going on in the world around them. Knowing as much about these things as you possibly can is the only way to really know who it is you came from. Only then, can you say what you have is family history, and only then can you truly understand your ancestors, and get a real sense of knowing what kind of blood is flowing in your veins.

So, you may be wondering, how are you supposed to get all this enriching contextual material, when all you have is, for example, a name on a census?

Sibling Research Can Uncover Hidden Gems

Start with the family! More often than not, people only concern themselves with the name of the child in a family that is their direct ancestor. Siblings are too often totally ignored.

When doing my own family history, the place I start is with the other members of the family. From my experience, most people never look for information regarding siblings. Many never even list their names. However, this can be a very rewarding line of research. In my own family I have many times discovered fascinating and extremely helpful information by doing this. For example, in my Haines line, I have a Carlisle Haines married to a Sarah Matlack. I'm sure these names mean nothing to you, as they didn't to me either. However, while researching Sarah's family, which included seven siblings, I discovered an extremely important piece of information.

Sarah had a brother named Timothy Matlack, It turns out that Timothy is the person who actually scribed the Declaration of Independence we all know and love. Yes, the words were written by Thomas Jefferson, but the handwriting on the final copy was that of Timothy Matlack. What an interesting discovery! So what does this mean for my family history? Well, there is quite a bit of material written about Timothy. By studying that, I can deduce that his family, including Sarah and her family, probably knew many of the people whose names we read of in the history books.

Perhaps they even attended social events together. Most likely they had political sympathies in line with Timothy's. It tells something also of the level of society in which they lived. So now, instead of having simply the names of some generation of great grandparents, I have the beginnings of understanding much more about who they were and how they lived. Further delvings into the family uncovered a lot more, information I would never have known if I had not begun looking at the siblings of my ancestor in the first place. (See more of my ancestors lives that I uncovered from researching siblings.)

So next time you just have a bunch of children listed on a census and you don't know anything else about the family, try researching the siblings. You never know what you can find.