## 39 Genealogy and History

As I said in a former post, I'm an amateur genealogist. I'm not practicing for a few years but I have done many researches about the origin of my family. I'm also a big fan of history. And those two things are linked together. But one of my question is to keep all my researches available for other members of my family without destroying confidentiality. 

What I like in genealogy is not to know if I'm a quarter German or Turkish or even Chinese. No, it's a real inquiry using archives (and now more digital archives, especially in France) and you will need to know many things. For example, if you are searching in some documents more old than 2 centuries, you will find documents from church register written in latin. If you don't have any basis of latin, it's difficult but not impossible. French is a latin language...and you will also find translators. It's the same with German or old language used in some regions. You will need a good screen because some documents aren't easy to read. And sometimes, the same name can be written differently considering the period. That's where history becomes important.

For my family, a war was important. They have left their town in 1871 because of the victory of Germany against France. They chose France as their homeland. It was difficult to find a new place to live and there are some mysteries for me during 10 years...All the administrative documents can't say something. But It's interesting to find more than only a certificate of birth or death, or wedding. Alas, sometimes war is destroying some documents… and every country in the world hadn't the same time of archive or the same way to give names and surnames. If for the french part of the family, it's quite easy to go until the 17th century, it's not so easy if some ancestors were from Italy, Vietnam, Belgium, etc.. I have learned many things about ancient jobs which have disappeared. For example, who knows the name of this job : The driver of a tramway. And there was so many jobs around agriculture before mechanization. 

To keep all that in mind, I have two ways. The first is the website Geneanet.org with a great database. But I have to be careful because some people are making mistakes. The second is to have a notebook with every thing on each person in the tree. I take also notes on the reference of the archive. It's a long job to have every document of each individuals. I have no time to do this now but I have backups of all my data for a big part of the tree. I have done this in only one way : from present to the past. I could also do it from the past to the present to find cousins etc.. The job never ends. I remember that a solicitor had given my parents a small inheritance, a few decades ago but I've never found the name of that person linked to my family. It's maybe someone from another branch of the tree I've not explored. I've never found a far link with someone famous. And I really don't care. 

What made me making all those researches was curiosity and to understand the links between history and my family. For centuries, the family of my father was in a single region. And the family of my mother came from different region what were not what I expected. And that was also very different for on of my grand mother who lived in the south of France. Some ancestors were on the borders and sometimes on the other side of a border. I don't know what made them change from location. There are not a lot of informations about climate or fights in those region, because before the 18th century, many of them worked in the fields or sometimes as a baker. It seems very far now and I won't be a good worker for that. I wonder what led some ancestors to join the military, when other stayed in the same region in the fields. That's the mystery behind genealogy and only writers could answer to my questions. I hope it will be easy for those who will come after me in centuries with all the data everywhere in our digital worl
d. But I'm not sure it will be better because sometimes paper is stronger that a digital file format.

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