Genealogical Trees 24 25 January 2025 Uni Bonn

Genealogy

Although biological relationships are a universal reality for all human beings, the concepts of “family” and “family bond” depend on both the geographic region and the historical moment to which they refer. However, the concept of “family” can be determinant in a large variety of societies, since it can influence the lines of succession, inheritances and social relationships, as well as where and with whom an individual is buried. The relation between a deceased person and other members of a community, other individuals of the same necropolis, or even with those who are buried in the same tomb can be analysed from the genetic point of view, considering different perspectives: archaeological, historical, and forensic. In the present work, the concepts of “family” and “kinship” are discussed, explaining the relevance of genetic analysis, such as nuclear and lineage markers, and their contribution to genealogical research, for example in the heritage of surnames and Y-chromosome, as we...

Genealogy, the social practice of creating extended knowledge about historical or now-living individuals considered to be 'relatives', is more popular and widespread in the twenty-first century than it ever has been. The advent of digital technologies and DNA testing have given it new perspectives. Long seen the privilege of elite groups, it is now a beloved pastime for people from very different walks of life. Some scholars would even say genealogy has been democratised. Exciting new work explores these recent developments. Scholars investigate the relevance of new technologies for contemporary understandings of ancestry, descent, kinship and family.1 Important as these recent discussions may be, they often fall short in assessing the deep history and historical variety of genealogical practices. While certainly not all civilisations developed articulate genealogical practices, many, nevertheless, did. There is a rich, millennia-old history to the field. Given the enormous richness of genealogy's history, especially when seen in a trans-epochal and global perspective, it is challenging to identify shared features. In fact, considering the different uses and forms that genealogy eventually acquired, the term itself almost looks like a somewhat vague umbrella term, linking together different and often distinct practices and cultural contexts. One way of bringing the many genealogical cultures of different times and regions into meaningful conversation, however, consists of a careful investigation of the material products they have created. The following papers discuss one of the most important material manifestations of genealogical activity across time and space: handwritten artefacts. Manuscripts were a highly prominent feature of many-perhaps even most-genealogical cultures, even when other media for storing and presenting relevant information were used as well. This introductory essay highlights several crucial characteristics of a manuscript-based approach to the history of genealogy; the following nine papers highlight the importance of manuscripts and manuscript production for genealogy regarding various richly contextualised case studies.

LingVaria

The paper provides an overview of a number of recent presentations of the Indo-European family tree and the split off its branches, as found in standard textbooks on the topic. These views are contrasted against the results of a workshop, The Indo-European family tree (University of Copenhagen, 15–17 Feb. 2017). Our account specifically addresses whether there are reasons to assume the existence of Italo-Celtic, Graeco-Armenian and what is the position of the Germanic branch in the tree. The use of new archaeological methods, computational cladistics and DNA-studies and their possible importance for diachronic linguistics are also mentioned.

Belleten

It would be proper and much enlightening to look for the reasons why and how the Ottoman Empire could perpetuate a brillant existence on three continents, Asia, Europe and Africa, in the Akhi Order or Fraternity. In other words, Akhi faith and principles should be counted amongst a myriads of factors that contributed into six centuries of Ottoman domination on these three continents.

Genealogy, 2017

A genealogy is a narrative that tries to explain a cultural phenomenon by describing a way in which it came about, or could have come about, or might be imagined to have come about. (-Bernard Williams ([1], p. 20).) Genealogy is an open-access, quarterly journal that publishes original research and theory online immediately after it has completed the review process. The journal will serve as a venue for cutting edge contributions to the field of genealogy studies; making this scholarly work available to the broadest possible reading audience in a timely manner. But what exactly is genealogy studies? The journal invites a multiplicity of answers to this question, seeking to foster a dialogue about the relevance of genealogical perspectives for an interdisciplinary array of theories and research questions. The journal's inaugural issue initiates this discussion by inviting essays that explore the question "What is Genealogy?" The journal also invites proposals for guest-edited special issues which can include (but are not limited to) family lineage and family studies more broadly defined, migration studies, histories of law and state policy, medical and health studies, literary studies and philology, the narration of all types of social identities (including but not limited to racial-ethnic, gendered, religious and political identities), and the implications that recent developments in genetic/genographic research and services hold for the narration of these identities. The introductory quote by Bernard Williams encompasses all of these directions. His definition of genealogy is both succinct and suitably vague; suggesting an analytic tendency that characterizes all genealogies, while allowing for a diversity of research interests and disciplinary perspectives which are amply illustrated by the scholarship of the journal's editorial board. But perhaps the most compelling feature of Williams' definition is the implication that genealogical narratives must be understood as methods of explanation and not simply aggregations of historical data. Put another way, the thing that is most genealogical about a genealogy is the method by which its contents have been strung together. Following Williams, if all genealogies are explanations, then they can also be understood as expressions of a philosophy of knowledge; whether these are essentialist epistemologies that have informed popular ideas about blood lineage or Nietzschean genealogical distinctions that are used to decenter universalist truth claims. Although these examples describe very different perspectives on genealogy, they both shed light on the uneasy tension between genealogical narratives and the dominant epistemologies of modernity. In the former case, genealogy recalls a premodern knowledge-neofeudal lineage trees that are at odds with the egalitarian subjectivities of the modern, liberal-democratic state. While in the latter case, genealogy gravitates toward the postmodern-taking the form of an explicit assault on modernist categories of thought. In both cases, genealogy lies on the margins of the modern. It embeds things in history, mapping irreducible singularities; generating a kind of knowledge radically counterpoised to the modernist paradigm described by Anthony Giddens [2], which dis-embeds things from localized contexts and reinserts them within generalizable categories that are articulated across progressively wider tracts of time and space. When viewed in this light, the journal's scope broadens considerably. Genealogy is also a venue for rethinking the contours of modern science. This aim is not well described by the idea of critique,

2021

When Yitzchok Meir Twersky, then a young student, decided to research his family genealogy, he didn’t foresee that he was beginning a three-decade long journey during which he would discover some 50,000 cousins and publish numerous books on the history and genealogy of the Twersky Chassidic dynasty. Nor did he think that it would lead him to co-author an unprecedented study that would combine centuries old archival records and state-of-the-art DNA testing to try to figure out who among the countless Twerskys trace their patrilineal lineage directly to the Meor Einayim, Harav Menachem Nachum, the first Rebbe of Chernobyl, who was a disciple of the Baal Shem Tov, and make an incredible discovery in the process. The fascinating story of how this unprecedented genealogical study to identify the Y-DNA genetic signature of the Twersky Chassidic Dynasty came about, contains an interview with the lead author of the study, Dr. Jeffrey Mark Paull.