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The Difference Between Genealogy and Family History
There is a marked difference between genealogy and the study of one’s family history even though the two terms are often used interchangeable in ordinary conversation. Genealogy is the study of the line of descent of a person or family. A family history, may include an account of the line of descent, but may also include much more detail about the achievements and events surrounding the lives of one’s ancestors.
The two studies are strongly related, even though a distinction should be made between them. They may even use the exact same historical documents in their data collection. The significance of those documents, however, may differ for each field. To the genealogist, a marriage record is a record of linkage. It denotes the addition of a new branch of ancestry added to a family. To a person creating a family history, however, the details surrounding the marriage are just as significant. A family historian might look at the guest list for the wedding for well-known or historically significant people who may have been in attendance even though they bear no familial relation to the bride and groom. They would note the church in which the wedding took place and possibly even research other figures who were also married, or baptized, or were regular attendees of that same church as a point of historical reference.
Genealogy is an important subcomponent of developing a family history. After all, if one doesn’t know who one’s ancestors are, one can hardly build the story of their lives. Detailed birth records, if they can be found, are by far the best single piece of documentation that a genealogist can discover. They provide not only the date of someone’s birth, but also the names of the mother and father, and often the mother’s maiden name as well. This provides an additional generation, another link in the ancestral chain for the genealogical record.
For the family historian, it might be as interesting to note from a birth certificate that a particular ancestor had her first child at the age of 18, just 10 months after she was married to a man more than twice her age, who made a small fortune when he sold his farmland in Ohio to John D. Rockefeller who was interested in the unfarmable acres on the back lot from which a sticky black substance would seep up from the ground. Of course that substance was oil, and Rockefeller went on to build Standard Oil into one of the largest monopolies in the history of our country. All of this would be extraneous information to the strict genealogist, but the very bread and butter of the family historian.
Family histories then are dependent upon genealogy as the framework upon which they build. Genealogy, likewise, uses available family history details, such as the fact that great grandfather met his wife while stationed overseas during World War I, as clues to direct its search for more family linkages.