Genealogy accounts for the descent of a person, family, or group from an ancestor or from older forms. In other words, it is the study of family ancestral lines.
This involves the collection of the names of relatives, living and dead, and establishing the relationships of each within a cohesive family tree.
Genealogy is closely related to family history, so much so that Wikipedia merged its articles on "Genealogy" and "Family History" on June 25, 2013, after a long internal discussion.
So, are they the same thing? Not really, or perhaps not always would be more accurate. By common usage, in the United States at least, they might be considered synonymous. But not really.
Genealogy focuses on identifying direct bloodline ancestors and creating a family tree that connects all of the dots between yourself and your ancestors. It is focused and targeted. The goal of ancestry is to trace your ancestry back as far as possible. Each generation is documented with names, dates, and places, generally involving exhaustive research into birth, death, and marriage certificates, which is often complicated by immigration, name alterations, and language difficulties. Thus, immigration papers, newspaper archives, cemetery records, and census records will be called upon, as might adoption records.
Family history, on the other hand, is wider in one sense but not as exhaustive in another. While research into family history includes understanding direct lineage, the researcher is generally interested only in the individuals who are significant to the narrative. Although most family histories don't include an all-inclusive genealogical record, they can.
On the other hand, family histories will include more than names, dates, and relationships. Family historians will want to learn about their ancestor's occupations, military service, religious affiliations, education, migration patterns, and causes of death. They will be interested in the social climate at the time, as well as anything that might have impacted the lives of their ancestors, including health issues. Usually, the family historian will primarily focus on those members of the family whose lives reverberated within the larger family dynamics or who had the largest footprint on the family, as well as those who were the most interesting or noteworthy in some way. In that way, family patriarchs, as well as those who were explorers, inventors, politicians, and the very wealthy members of a family, will probably play a part in family history, but so will any pirates, serial killers, or scoundrels who might be found in the family tree. A genealogy might be compared to a spreadsheet or a database, while a family history is a book. Nevertheless, family history is more closely related to genealogy than to history, so we will include both within this portion of our web guide.
How about genealogy and ancestry? Are they the same?
Genealogy is a record of your family line, while ancestry is the line of people who come before you in your family line. In other words, your ancestry doesn't include people who are younger than you, while genealogy does, although most people will continue their family tree beyond their own place in it, so the differences between genealogy and ancestry are minor.
If we really wanted to complicate matters, we might consider that everyone has two family trees: a genealogical tree and a genetic tree.
Genetic ancestry is the record of those ancestors who passed their DNA along to you over the generations. Because of the manner in which DNA is inherited, your genetic tree can look very different from your genealogical tree.
Ideally, two parents would each contribute 50% of their DNA to each child, each grandparent would contribute 25% of their DNA to each grandchild, and a great-grandparent would pass along 12.5% of their DNA, and so on, the percentage dropping by half with each generation.
It doesn't work that way, however. You might receive 55% of your DNA from one parent, while the other would be the source of the other 45%, and those numbers could be reversed or different for your siblings. To further complicate matters, as DNA merges and mixes, it can create new strands that don't match either parent. The result is that there will likely be people in your genealogical family tree with whom you don't share any genetic ancestry, and there isn't necessarily a mailman involved.
Common methods for tracking ancestry or genealogy include talking to living family members and relatives, following a paper trail, or testing your DNA.
DNA testing sites, such as Ancestry.com have become common sources of information for people trying to complete their family tree. However, every time I log into my DNA testing account, I find that they have changed my DNA results, and others have reported differences between DNA test results from different DNA testing sites.
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