Family Tree Template: Family History

Friday, September 14, 2012

Family History

Family history is the systematic narrative and research of past events relating to a specific family, or specific families. For the social history of all families, see Social history#History of the family and History of childhoodWhile genealogy is the convenient label for the field, family history is the overarching term, since genealogy in the strict sense is only concerned with tracing unified lineages.[dubious – discuss] Other sectors of family history, such as one-name studies, may pay only rudimentary attention to lineages, or may emphasize biography rather than vital data.

Forms of family history research include:

genealogy (tracing a living person's pedigree back in time from the present, or a historic person's descendancy to the present, using archival records)

genetic genealogy (discovering relationships by comparing the DNA of living individuals);

one-name studies (an investigation of all persons with a common surname)

one-place studies