How does genealogy help someone understand their heritage? One thing that genealogy does with family history is it gives you a feeling of who you are and where you came from. One thing that family history...
One thing that family history does is it gives you a feeling of who you are and where you came from. I will give you an example. I am tall. I have black hair but I have grey eyes - a relatively strange combination. But it's very, very common in our family. I ordered a Civil War record on my great-great-grandfather. His physical description said that he was 5'10", black hair, fair complexion, and grey eyes. Since 1862 those traits have followed through our family.
A person can get a feeling about family traits that have been passed down through generations. My sons tells me that my itchy feet and their itchy feet for moving and seeing come from the fact that both sides of my family never stayed put for more than three or four years before they were on the move again.
It can also supply medical information. Death certificates can help you figure out what the common causes of death are for the family. This can be important to know if the causes of death are health problems that are inherited.
If you still live in an area where your family has lived for many years, for example, my husband's family is from a small area of North Carolina, where the family has lived, since about 1720, then you don't have to search for graveyards or struggle to uncover things about your family or to know the traditions of the family because the family has always lived there and such knowledge is passed down through the generations. For example, my husband's family, their food, their traditions reach all the way back to England, but, you take someone like me whose family has traveled through all those generations, I am a hodgepodge of traditions and family foods. It gives you a feeling of who you are and where you came from and that's something that's very much missing today with families so scattered.
