SATIRICAL LINKS: NOW! NEW, IMPROVED GENEALOGY!

by Beth Maltbie Uyehara <buye@aol.com>

I have only been doing genealogy for a little while -- barely more than two years -- but already I can see that there's lots of room for improvement. If economics is called The Dismal Science, then genealogy has got to be considered The Downright Morbid Hobby. (All those dead ancestors, for starters. Give me a break.) Although the end results of our genealogical efforts are gratifying, and produce cute little charts suitable for framing, the methodology is tedious, annoying, hard on the eyes and time-consuming.

The main problem with genealogy is that most of us are saddled with disorganized, uncooperative and generally poor-caliber ancestors. If we're going to improve genealogy, then we need to improve our ancestors.

Ancestral Upgrades

I'm not suggesting that we trade in dear old g-g-g-g-whosiewhat for Marie Antoinette or Napoleon. That's silly. What I am suggesting is that we modestly upgrade those inconsiderate ancestors who hid in the coal cellar when the census taker arrived, no doubt thinking he was the tax man; the thoughtless ones who never bought land or left a forwarding address; who "forgot" (ha, ha, very funny, grandpa) to post banns and have the kids christened.

Surely there are leftover ancestors somewhere who have been neglected despite having been compulsive record-keepers -- who left reams of diaries, Bibles, deeds, wills, etc. These poor neglected chaps would be delighted, I'm sure, to be incorporated into some nice modern-day pedigree. Why struggle with lackadaisical ancestors who obviously didn't care a fig about us, when perfectly respectable, highly annotated ancestors are being wasted? Wasted!

We see evidence of these well-behaved, but underutilized ancestors all over the place. They show up as the legible name on the census record, right above the faded smudge we suspect might be great-great-grandpa. The sibling whose every life achievement was recorded in minute detail -- in still-vivid black ink -- while his younger brother (the "birth ancestor" nature unfortunately assigned us) barely made it into the margin of the family Bible in No. 3 pencil. , Etc. , Etc.

So, let's give ourselves permission to select the ancestors we truly deserve.

Ancestral Clip Art

All of us have some old photos that we can't identify. Why are these always the good-looking ones?

I have a picture of my great-grandmother that must have shattered the lens of that old wooden camera they used to photograph her. I'm surprised the state of Ohio didn't ban photography for good when that thing was printed. You look at it and wonder just how desperate great-grandpa was to get, uh, married. How did our family find the will to reproduce again after she came along? If ever there was a reason for a family to pack it in genetically, this was it. The best explanation I can come up with is that she must have had one heck of a good personality. And of course, house lighting was pretty poor in those days. And women wore veils a lot.

On the other hand, I've got old photos of beauties who would have wowed the crowned heads of Europe, and not a clue as to who any of them might have been. You see where this is leading? Let's establish a central photo database of unclaimed good-looking ancestors that we can all dip into. Who'd know the difference? If someday, your own descendants should -- quite by accident, of course -- get your photo mixed up with Marilyn Monroe's or Clark Gable's, would you really object? Aren't you secretly hoping they will?

New Math

For those sticklers who don't care to upgrade their ancestors, let's establish some ground rules to handle ill-kept and/or offensive records. If you can't read your ancestor's census entry, go three lines above it and see if you can read that one. If not, continue back three lines at a time until you come to a legible entry. When you finally find something you can read, copy it out and footnote it thus: 1870 Ohio census/Microfilm #whatever/"Rule of Three."

And should you encounter, as I have, ancestors so poor in basic arithmetic that they actually claimed a marriage date two years AFTER the birth of their first child, you should correct the date of the marriage to nine months prior to the birth. They'd do the same for you.

Of course, if what you like is the challenge of genealogy, then feel free to continue under the old rules. And, what the heck -- why not raise the bar for your own descendants? For instance, take a lesson from George Foreman and give all your kids the same first name. Take a lesson from my family, and give the kids first/last-name-combinations that have been used already -- at random -- in three consecutive generations. Insist on soft marble headstones in rainy climates. Endorse census sampling.

We can, with very little effort, drive our descendants as nuts as our ancestors are driving us.

"reprinted" with permission from by Beth Maltbie Uyehara

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