Pursuit of Family History Won't Be Around in 20 Years!?? As Bill West said, "Not Dead Yet!!"

The June 6, 2013 post by Bill West on West in New England titled "Not Dead Yet" got me to thinking -- and I believe I am in complete agreement with Bill.

Bill's rumination began with a post on The Verge subtitled, "The eternal search for our ancestors is reaching its end game."  The basic tenet of The Verge piece is that the end game for genealogy is upon us because the colossal gathering and digitization of data combined with DNA technology will soon make the questions we have about our relatives -- who they are, how they got here, and how they are related to us -- "instantly solvable."  Bill is a skeptic, and so am I.

If one believes that the only questions that consume genealogists are the who, where, when, and how about relatives, then perhaps the raw datapoint gatherings addressed by The Verge article do mark a huge milestone in genealogy -- but in my humble opinion it is far from the end game.

I have often referred to the present digitized, search engine driven state of genealogy research as the Golden Age of Genealogy.  It has indeed opened up the accessibility of genealogical information and significantly reduced the expense of genealogy as a hobby, avocation or profession.  In days not long past, one would need to be financially independent with a consuming interest in family history to spend the time and money necessary to travel, search out, and manually transcribe the records left by one's ancestors and relatives.  Few could afford to engage in this endeavor in any serious way.  It is true that all that has changed now and the change is accelerating at a thrilling and breathtaking pace.  BUT, does this mean all the questions we have about our families will soon be instantly solvable with DNA results and citations to untold numbers of birth, marriage, death, education, land record, military service and other records at the click of a mouse, the touch of a screen, or the use of whatever the next delivery method becomes?  I really doubt it.

The supposedly instantly solvable questions posed in The Verge piece leave out what many of us might say are the most elusive and yet the most intriguing questions of all -- the WHY questions that might get us to the heart of who our ancestors and relatives were and why they did what they did when they did it.  Admittedly, the answers to these why-type questions are not capable of the same precision and accuracy that a birth record can often provide, but aren't those "vital" records sometimes not what they seem and do not such records oft times mask greater underlying mysteries?  I think that for many who pursue genealogy, the new Golden Age of Genealogy and the accelerating flood of data available simply excites with the possibility of ever increasing data points for analysis -- but it is the analysis that matters most!  Just like the resolution of a picture can be sharpened with more and more pixels, the analysis of genealogy can be immeasurably enhanced by having more and more data points to review and consider -- to analyze, interpret and synthesize into a story that comes ever closer to answering not just the who, what, where and how questions, but also the why questions that can intrigue us most.

Let me pose an example and a question that will illustrate why I do not think we are approaching the end game of genealogy where our questions will be instantly solvable.

My ancestors, Richard and Mary (Clarke) Tew, left Northamptonshire, England in 1640 and traveled across the Atlantic to reside in Newport, Rhode Island.  So far as I know, they owned no property in Rhode Island and had no relatives waiting to greet them and ease their entry into the New World.  They both came from Yeoman families and were probably what would today be considered "middle class."  Add to this that Mary was pregnant when they left England (she gave birth to their first child -- Seaborn Tew -- during the voyage!) and the most intriguing questions are not who they were or where they came from, but rather WHY they left England on a dangerous voyage across the Atlantic while Mary was well along in her first pregnancy.  There are no known diaries to even begin to explicitly answer the why of Richard's and Mary's voyage to America -- and so the search for more data goes on to gather more and more genealogical pixels to give the picture better resolution and lead slowly to a vision that might begin to crystalize into an image that gets also to the why of Richard and Mary.  

If genealogy is nothing save a very personal approach to investigating and understanding history, then this leads to the perhaps rhetorical question, "If the rapid accumulation of data and DNA testing mean the end game for genealogy via instantly solvable questions about our families, then must not the same thing be said about the study of history in general?"  I think not.

Contemplate the accumulation of data and even biological information about historical persons and events over say the last 200 years.  Now consider the number of books, articles, critiques and analyses that have been published about any single notable historical person or event during that same time.  Does anyone think we have all the answers about those people and events?  Has everything been analyzed and written so that we have reached the end game of any one of those historical events??

[Thanks to Bill West and The Verge for prompting this post!]  

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Gravestone photograph by the author from a trip to Ireland in 2009 where one project was documentation of O'Kane gravestones in and around Dungiven, County Derry/Londonderry, Northern Ireland.

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _

Copyright 2013, John D. Tew

_ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _