eir possessor. But the traits of his
mind and body are likely to go on to his descendants indefinitely.
These are therefore the facts of his life on which attention should be
focused.
(d) More pictorial data should be added. Photographs of the members of
the family, at all ages, should be carefully preserved. Measurements
equally deserve attention. The door jamb is not a satisfactory place for
recording the heights of children, particularly in this day when
removals are so frequent. Complete anthropometric measurements, such as
every member of the Young Men's Christian Association, most college
students, and many other people are obliged to undergo once or
periodically, should be placed on file.
(e) Pedigrees should be traced upward from a living individual, rather
than downward from some hero long since dead. Of course, the ideal
method would be to combine these two, or to keep duplicate pedigrees,
one a table of ascendants and the other of descendants, in the same
stock.
Genealogical data of the needed kind, however, can not be reduced to a
mere table or a family tree. The ideal genealogy starts with a whole
fraternity--the individual who is making it and all his brothers and
sisters. It describes fully the fraternity to which the father belongs,
giving an account of each member, of the husband or wife of that member
(if married) and their children, who are of course the first cousins of
the maker of the genealogical study. It does the same for the mother's
fraternity. Next it considers the fraternity to which the father's
father belongs, considers their consorts and their children and
grandchildren, and then takes up the study of the fraternity of the
father's mother in the same way. The mother's parents next receive
attention; and then the earlier generations are similarly treated, as
far as the available records will allow. A pedigree study constructed on
this plan really shows what traits are running through the families
involved, and is vastly more significant than a mere chain of links,
even though this might run through a dozen generations.
(5) With these changes, genealogy would become the study of heredity,
rather than the study of lineage.
It is not meant to say that the study of heredity is nothing more than
applied genealogy. As understood nowadays, it includes mathematical and
biological territory which must always be foreign to genealogy. It might
be said that in so far as man is concerned, he
|