Genealogy is very popular currently in the U.S. Even within scientific and academic institutions, the rising importance of genetics in medicine and social science research has spearheaded a growing interest in genealogical records. For this family tree site, I thought I'd summarize some of this work since I think it is interesting and can use it in my teaching:
Anthropology and the Social Sciences
Anthropologists (primarily) along with sociologists, geographers, and other social scientists over the last century or so have studied how various cultures define family. The definitions of family vary widely between cultures and even within a single culture over changing times. How a culture defines what is...and what is not... family powerfully affects an individual's identity, pool of potential mates, religion, legal status, and social standing. Sometimes these definitions are codified into law. In many other cases, such definitions are defined by custom and tradition.
Across Cultures
For example, orthodox Judaism defines a child as belonging within Judaism by whether the mother is Jewish or not. If the father is Jewish and the mother is a Gentile, then the child must be consecrated as Jewish by a rabbi. This is an example of matrilineal descent: where direct descent is traced through the mother's line rather than through the father's family.
Traditionally ...and sometimes by law...American and European countries have tended to define a child's legal status and name through patrilineal descent through the father's family. This concept came into U.S. law via English common law but was changed in the American South due to slavery. When slaveowners had children by slave women, English common law in colonial America thus dictated that the child's status followed the status of the father: in other words, if the father was free than so was the child. In the 1600s the Virginia colonial government reversed this in the case of children of slave women: the child's status of free or slave was based on the status of the mother. This legal concept later was adopted throughout the American South.
In China where traditionally male children are much more highly prized over daughters, brides are viewed as an economic liability: they are raised in one family only to be given in marriage to another as an adult. Thus, Chinese incorporates the term wai jia, "outer family," for a person's maternal family line and nei jia, "inner family," for a person's paternal...and thus more respected...family line. Similarly, age gave people greater respect in traditional Chinese society. So, Chinese has separate words to denote whether a person's brother/sister is one's older brother/sister or younger brother/sister.
Definitions of family have also dictated who a person could marry or not marry. This concept has also varied widely between cultures. In ancient Egypt, certain Egyptian dynasties routinely married brother and sister in the royal family as a way to protect their divine nature as Pharoah from being diluted with lesser bloodlines. Of course, this led eventually to genetic problems as reflected in Akhenaton, the deformed pharoah that preceeded King Tut.
Many royal families have practiced a similar in-breeding tho not as close as brother and sister. Most of Europe's royal families are inter-related through a series of royal marriages. Recently scientists were able to verify the remains of the Russian imperial family by comparing mitochondrial DNA in their bones to that of a living relative, Prince Phillip of Great Britain.
Other societies have taken almost a completely different tack. The Natchez Indians the lower Mississippi Valley were a strict hierarchial monarchy ruled by the Great Sun, their king, and his family, the Lesser Suns. The commoners at the bottom of this social hierarchy were called roughly the Stinkards. The Stinkards had little or no rights and were at the whim of the Great Sun's wishes. The Great Sun (always male), however, by tribal law could not marry a woman of the Lesser Sun royalty class. Instead, he and all the royal class (male and female alike) had to by law marry a Stinkard. This effectively provided some type of social mobility for Stinkards and prevented genetic in-breeding.
This fear of in-breeding became a very important concept especially for groups living in remote areas where the population...and thus the pool of potential mates...was small. Thus, the tradition in the past of Polynesian women welcoming sex with traveling European sailors came as a shock to the sailors European sensibilities but was a custom that made good sense to people living on small, far-flung islands. Similarly, the Inuit custom of a husband offering his wife for sex to visitors was another way to incorporate fresh DNA into a village or nomadic band's bloodlines.
This concept of course differs greatly from other societies such as Europe and the Middle East where great steps were/are taken to ensure that women are carefully guarded from all men other than their direct male relatives or husbands. Thus, the concept of the haram is really a problem with definition: Islamic civilizations defined status through a strict patrilineal method. Whereas a woman giving birth provides no doubt to status in a matrilineal society, patrilineal societies must take great lengths to ensure that the father whose line the child's status will be defined by is the actual biological or legal father.
Similary, in several western African societies where men may have multiple wives (sometimes living in separate towns), the responsibility of providing male role modeling to children is often customarily performed by the mother's brother(s) rather than by her husband.
Across Time
Even within U.S. society, the concept of family has varied by ethnic group and class. This concept both legally and socially also has changed...and is changing. For instance, throughout most of human history the traditional family has been the extended family where a couple share their home with children, grandparents, cousins, and others. In many societies such as that of the Biblical patriarchs, this included polygamy, multiple marriages at the same time. In the Biblical example (and today under Islamic law and among Mormon dissidents), a man could have multiple wives (up to four in the case of Islamic men). Women, however, could not have multiple husbands in these societies although cases of this were/are found in parts of rural India.
The concept of the "typical family" has changed rapidly in the U.S. and western Europe in the last 150 years largely through the influence of economics. The traditional extended family evolved and functioned as an extension of an agricultural society. Families lived together and worked together on the family farm. The Waltons TV family reflected this concept.
Industrialization gave birth to the nuclear family, the concept of family as mother, father, and children without the addition of the extended family. Whereas large families were an asset in farming as a source of labor, life in town and cities where people were dependent on a fixed factory wage made having small families economically wise.
The changing role of women in American society by the 1960s also had a major impact on family structure. Previously for white women especially, work outside of the home that provided a wage sufficient to support a family was difficult. Restrictions on women owning property, getting a credit card in their own names, etc. greatly limited women and left them little choice in many cases of leaving an abusive or unhappy marriage. With greater job opportunities in service jobs in the U.S. since the 1960s and changes in law and custom opening economic and social opportunities for divorced or single parent women, this family configuration has risen as a percentage of family types in the U.S.
Even before feminism opened these opportunities for white women, black women in the U.S. faced a very different history. Under slavery, black slave couples could not legally marry since they were property. Although slave families performed religious ceremonies to unite a couple, these were not legally binding marriages. Emancipation during and after the Civil War brought with it the opportunity of legal marriage. Economic necessities, however, often drove black women to working as domestic servants, nurses, and a host of other jobs that gave them some measure of economic self-reliance long before middle and upper-class white women entered the work force.
The transformation of the American family through frequent moves, the establishment...and sometimes dissolution...of the nuclear family, and changing economic forces have broken down many of the welfare aspects of the extended family. No longer are many grandparents around to care for children as readily available babysitters. Nor are families often living with grandparents and elderly relatives such as "spinster aunts", etc. to provide them with care. Thus, U.S. society continues to grapple with the problem of providing care to dependents such as children and the elderly. Instead of families providing this support, there has been in the 20th century an evolving system of public and private systems put in place to provide services once performed by the extended family: Medicare, social security, day care centers, and nursing homes to name a few.
Legally, the concept of family and the related concept of marriage has changed greatly. Marriage restrictions on people of different religions or races have been lifted through court cases such as Loving v. Virginia, the court case that brought down the last U.S. law prohibiting interracial marriage in 1969. Women are no longer legally viewed as property of their husbands although archaic laws on the books may still strictly define them as such. For instance, a recent court case in Missouri centered on a husband suing the man who had an affair with the first man's wife. The husband based his case on the wording of Missouri law that defined a wife as her husband's property. Thus, the husband sued that the man had stolen and/or misappropriated the husband's property without his permission.
Similarly, the Grandparents Bill being discussed in Congress in 1998 focuses on extending the rights of grandparents, a group increasingly raising the children of divorced, deceased, or single-parent parents.
Another changing concept in family law is the idea of domestic partnerships, the provision of benefits to couples who cannot or choose not to legally marry. This type of family ranges from same-sex gay/lesbian couples who cannot legally marry currently in the U.S. to heterosexual couple who live together outside of wedlock. Interestingly, the largest bulk of people often affected by domestic partnership ordinances in various larger cities are elderly couples who choose not to marry for financial reasons involving social security and pension payments as well as to not complicate inheritance issues. While the word marriage is often looked upon as a single concept, it actually involves two different ceremonies: religious marriages and the civil/legal benefits going to couples who legally marry. Thus, couples seeking domestic partnerships or a revamping of marriage laws seek the legal benefits of marriage (estimated recently by the General Accounting Office to be well over 1000 benefits from the Federal government alone). These benefits include: insurance for a person's partner/children, tax benefits, inheritance, hospital visitation rights, child custody/visitation rights, power of attorney, protection from sub poena to testify against one's partner, and a host of other legal-financial benefits. Interestingly, Sweden has already faced these questions and addressed them by reworking their tax and benefit system to be based on the individual rather than the household.
Family is also a cultural concept. Literature, TV, and films often depict ideals of "what a family should be." The 1950s certainly witnessed the adoration of the nuclear family where the husband worked, the mother was a homemaker, and the kids squeaky clean: Father Knows Best, The Donna Reed Show, I Love Lucy, Ozzie and Harriet. Until very recently, television depictions of the American family were quite out-of-odds with real life. Although nuclear families now make up about 17% or less of American households, they made up 80% plus of the families depicted on U.S. television into the 1990s. Today the leading family household type is a couple living together with no children.
Legal issues and technology are also changing concepts within family law. For instance, a recent court case centered on a woman trying to gain legal right to the frozen sperm of her husband (or fiance) who had been killed in a car accident. She wished to conceive a child by him post-humously. Another interesting case involved a scientist who tried to copyright in his name the DNA structure of an Ecuadorean woman whose blood had a unique anti-cholesterol property to it. The question that arises is just who owns our DNA? The publicly-supported Human Genome Project to map the human gene sequence does not seek to copyright the genes themselves, but HGP's public corporate arm does hold copyright to the database itself.
Genetics
Whereas some societies define family primarily through the mother's line and others through the father's line, there are interesting medical concepts underlying genealogy...especially where there is a focus on plotting a genetic feature within a family.
Generally it is thought that a child takes 50% of its genes from one parent and another 50% from the other parent. Recently, however, some biologists have conjectured that the mix might not be 50/50 but sometimes 60/40 or similar mixes. This idea is quite controversial still and no proven.
Although unfinished, here is an experiment I tried based on the accepted 50/50% from each parent. Making such a complex table for the Web is a big logic puzzle, but here is web page showing some of the descendents of Didemma and John Hirschman, my great-great-grandparents, and the percentage of shared genetic heritage that I share with these people. Thus, Didemma and John constitute only 12.5% of my genes (6.25 each).
My family name, Jones, is the gift of patrilineal descent: it is the family name of my father, my father's father, my father's father's father, and so forth.
Being a patrilineal society, Americans rarely consider our lines of matrilineal descent. Genetically, however, they are rather special:
Inside each cell in our bodies, there is a tiny structure called the mitochondrium. It serves as the engine and power source of the entire cell. Whereas the nucleus of each cell is the storage site for our cellular DNA, the blueprints of our cells and entire body, the mitochondria have their own separate set of DNA, mitochondrial DNA. Biologists now believe that billions of years ago as cellular life arose on this planet, an ameobic cell ate another type of primitive mitochondrial cell. Instead of digesting the mitochondrium, however, the two began working together in a symbiosis. This unified structure of mitochondria and nuclei became the cellular structure passed down through all cellular life.
Interestingly, however, our mitochondrial DNA is only passed from mother to child. It is also passed down as an exact copy. Thus, except for mutations to this mitochondrial DNA from radiation, etc., the mitochondria in my cells are exact copies of my most distant matrilineal ancestress: past down from mother to daughter down to my own mother.
My father, on the other hand, has different mitochondrial DNA. My children would also have their mother's and not my mitochondria.
You can view my patrilineal and matrilineal branches here.
So, consider for an instance if the U.S. was a matrilineal society. Instead of being a Jones, I would be a Dillard, the most distant matrilineal ancestor I have yet found. Likewise:
Hopefully this long essay will give you some thought about family: its past, present, and future configurations. -Jeff, July 26, 1998