Why trace your roots?

Every human being has within himself the desire to know where he comes from.

Yes obviously he may know who his parents are and the town or city of his birth. He may even know the time of his birth, if his mother remembers it and tells him when he took his first breath. He may know his grandparents names and there may be old sepia photographs on the walls of his parents or grandparents home, of perfect strangers, posing in stiff formal poses who, he is informed, are his great-grandparents.

Who were these strangers whose names are lost in the mists of time? Who were their parents and grandparents? What sort of life did they lead? What forces made them leave the land of their birth and make them come to South Africa? What did they find when they landed on these fair shores and what trials and tribulations did they experience? What joys and successes visited them and their descendants?

Should one decide to embark on the quest to discover the answers to these questions and the multitude of others that arise during the quest, that tracing ones roots is like being a detective, trying to discover clues that are spread across time and distance. The pleasure comes in unravelling the mystery and discovering the answers that lead one to more questions and or course, more answers.

During the quest the history of our family and of the world, comes alive. What to us may be history was to our ancestors current affairs. Other lessons learned during the quest could and often do lead to a greater knowledge and understanding of such diverse subject as old writing, archival sources, photography, naming patterns, church records and history, geography, migration patterns, military history, old professions, census records, the law of succession, heraldry and so on.

At the same time one meets and makes many new friends and often times one makes contact with relatives that one didn't know one had - distant relatives none the less but interesting all the same because they spring from the same source that one does too.

At the start of the quest one should determine what it is that one wants to achieve:

Do you want to trace your roots in the paternal or male line only, back to a common ancestor, which is generally the method used by Afrikaans speaking South African researchers who want to trace all the descendants of the first person of a particular surname who arrived in South Africa, regardless of when that arrival occurred?

In South African genealogy the first person of a particular surname arriving in the country is considered to be the 'stamvader' or progenitor of the family in South Africa and all his descendants, those people bearing the same surname as him, are considered to be important.

What about the female descendants you might ask and the answer is relatively simple - they get married to a person from another family and their descendants are recorded in that family.

Another choice may be trace both paternal and maternal lines back to a specific point in time or as far back as it is possible to find information, regardless of where the line takes you?

Using this method it must be remembered that in each generation the number of people doubles up. You have two parents, four grandparents, eight grandparents, sixteen great granparents and so on. In each generation half of the people in that generation are female which brings in a multitude of new surnames to investigate.

If you decide to trace your family back ten generations, which is about 300 years, assuming that each generation is about thirty years, you would have the names of 432 people in the tenth generation and 883 people in total. Go back one extra generation and the number in that generation rises to 864 and the total to 1747 people.

Go back thirty generations or 900 years and the number of people in the thirtieth generation number in the millions.

Of course this doesn't take account of the names of all of the children and the children's children that are revealed during such research, should you choose to record their details, which is at a guess a combination of the first and second choices in the questions I asked about deciding what choice you need to make in determining what route your research should follow.

The amazing thing to note is that should any one of the multitude of personal ancestors identified as you trace back in time had died young or had never married the person that they did or had never married, you would not have been alive today as the person you are. Each and every one of those personal ancestors is vitally important to who and what you are.

You may want to prove or disprove some family legend, say for example that great great uncle Charlie fought at Waterloo or that great great aunt Nellie was the maid of Queen Victoria or that an ancestor discovered and owned a gold mine and that by rights your family should be wealthy.

You may want to connect your family to some historical grouping like the 1820 Settlers or the French Huguenots or you may have another reason which is personal to you. Whatever the reason, know that the first and most important step is to make the decision to get started. Don't leave it for someone else to do, get stuck in right away yourself.

You will find the quest interesting, informative, surprising, frustrating from time-to-time and quite satisfying most of the time. You will probably answer the question of where you came from more fully than prior to starting. You will increase your knowledge, keep your mind active and make friends.

What more could you ask for?