AFRICAN AMERICAN FAMILY RECORD CIRCA 1880 SHOWING PROGRESS IN FREEDOM

I love the Before and After the Civil War of the African American farm family illustrated in this chart, which is held by the Library of Congress Collection.  It was produced by Krebs Lithographing Company, Cincinnati, Ohio.  It's a chromolithograph and is circa about 1880, about fifteen years after the slaves were freed.

FAMILY RECORD

Make a page for each ancestor?

This image is held by the Library of Congress.

It was originally copyright 1878 by artist John. R. Staples.

THE ANCESTRY OF PRESIDENT GEORGE WASHINGTON

A chart from the Library of Congress that includes the English Heraldry of the Washington family.  I'm always interested in the artistic notions that various family trees, records, and other documents reveal.  These historical renderings can inspire us to think about ways we can fashion our own ancestral charts.

3000 YEARS OF FAKE GENEALOGIES - YES THE BIBLE INCLUDED

ATLAS OBSCURA ; 3000 YEARS OF FAKE GENEALOGIES  by George Pendle

The history of human's faking their genealogies to make themselves and their ancestors more illustrious than they really are/were - probably to hide some scandals - goes way back.  The Bible for instance.

EXCERPT :  The language of trees as been used to describe human bloodlines for millennia.  The ancient Romans called the scrolls that listed their genealogical history, stemmata ("garlands"). Similarly Rome's historians used the growth and fall of trees to mark the rise and fall of imperial dynasties. Tacitus wrote of Claudius's son Britannicus as being the "True and genuine stock: and of suffering a "too-green" death.  Pliny often used the arboreal terms "gracting," Splicing: and "pruning: to allude to the abortions, adulteries and child murder taking place around him.

INSPIRATION for A FAMILY TREE

INVERTED FAMILY PYRAMIDS and SAME FAMILY REINCARNATION

Now that so many people are limiting the number of children they have to one or two, I'm finding more inverted family pyramids.   Example: a farm family in the Carolinas who had six to 12 children per woman in the 1800's and hundreds of descendants by 1900, three or four generations later is down to three nuclear families and so far one boy to possibly carry that family name forward.  (The surname itself will not go extinct because it's fairly common, in this case.)

I was speculating, based on a theory of reincarnation that families tend to reincarnate to continue relationships, or work out problems, that this has to mean a lot of deceased ancestors are waiting in the spirit world for their chance.  (Or they may just have to move on to a new family group!)

In my own family I suspect there are two people, now teenagers, who may be related to a couple - their great great grandparents, who would be my grandparents on one side.  I have photos of them, but there are also children born, granted there are 16 great great grandparents, who look like no one alive.  The mysteries of DNA!  But what if these new people simply have inherited the genes of ancestors no one has a photo, drawing, etching, or painting of?

I want to say, "Ah you have so and so's ears!" but I can't prove it.  It's easy to think that DNA is dictating the physicality, and the psychology (when there are say mental illnesses or learning differences) of the person, yet some reincarnation theorists feel sure that we someone pick out looks or have birth marks on our bodies where significant wounds occurred in a past life.  In this case, someone who is mostly of dark Mediterranean heritage, looks like the Slavic grandmother/great-grandmother and has some of her mannerisms.

For those of you who do not believe in reincarnation and haven't even considered reading around it with a doubter's sensibility, I realize some of this is esoteric - or ridiculous.  But whenever I read around children remembering their past life, or see videos about it on YouTube, I'm reminded that there is so much we do not know about our existence.  Most of us believe we have an eternal part called the soul, and we disagree about what happens to it after this life we know.

As for reincarnating in a family to work out problems, in some cases I think it would be better if someone said "stop the insanity!" and reincarnated into a healthier family!

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