(c) More family traits should be marked. Those at present recorded are mostly of a social or economic nature, and are of little real significance after the death of their 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, heredity is the interpretation of genealogy, and eugenics the application of heredity. Genealogy should give its students a vision of the species as a great group of ever-changing, interrelated organisms, a great network originating in the obscurity of the past, stretching forward into the obscurity of the future, every individual in it organically related to every other, and all of them the heritors of the past in a very real sense.
Genealogists do well in giving a realization of the importance of the family, but they err if they base this teaching altogether on the family's pride in some remote ancestor who, even though he bore the family name and was a prodigy of virtues, probably counts for very little in the individual's make-up to-day. To take a concrete though wholly imaginary illustration: what man would not feel a certain satisfaction in being a lineal descendant of George Washington? And yet, if the Father of his Country be placed at only four removes from the living individual, nothing is more certain than that this hypothetical living individual had fifteen other ancestors in George Washington's generation, any one of whom may play as great or a greater part in his ancestry; and so remote are they all that, as a statistical average, it is calculated that the contribution of George Washington to the ancestry of the hypothetical living individual would be perhaps not more than one-third of 1% of the total. The small influence of one of these remote ancestors may be seen at a glance, if a chart of all the ancestors up to the generation of the great hero is made. Following out the illustration, a pedigree based on George Washington would look like the diagram in Fig. 41. In more remote generations, the probable biological influence of the ancestor becomes practically nil. Thus Americans who trace their descent to some royal personage of England or the Continent, a dozen generations ago, may get a certain amount of spiritual satisfaction out of the relationship, but they certainly can derive little real help, of a hereditary kind, from this ancestor. And when one goes farther back,—as to William the Conqueror, who seems to rank with the Mayflower immigrants as a progenitor of many descendants—the claim of descent becomes really a joke. If 24 generations have elapsed between the present and the time of William the Conqueror, every individual living to-day must have had living in the epoch of the Norman conquest not less than sixteen million ancestors. Of course, there was no such number of people in all England and Normandy, at that time, hence it is obvious that the theoretical number has been greatly reduced in every generation by consanguineous marriages, even though they were between persons so remotely related that they did not know they were related. C. B. Davenport, indeed, has calculated that most persons of the old American stock in the United States are related to each other not more remotely than thirtieth cousins, and a very large proportion as closely as fifteenth cousins.
THE SMALL VALUE OF A FAMOUS, BUT REMOTE, ANCESTOR