Having laid down certain fundamental principles under­lying the whole proposition of preparing a family history the next point to be settled is the determination of what is to be included in the attempt.

How far back into the family history shall the work extend? Is it intended to begin in America, or before coming to this country; to bring down one line of the family, or sev­eral lines, or all of the lines known that bear the surname; to bring down those of the surname only, which includes the male line and the unmarried females, dropping out the other female lines as they marry and take other surnames; or to carry along for a time the female lines, dropping them at a definite remoteness from their departure from the family surname?

All of these questions enter in and they should be definitely decided before beginning the work, otherwise complications may arise which will become a serious handicap.

What may be called the accepted plan is to begin with the common emigrant ancestor and go briefly and somewhat sketchily back over some generations of the family in their English or European surroundings, spending some little thought on the derivation of the family name and its varia­tions, additions and subtractions, and including a brief sketch  of the  ancestral  home, thus laying a respectable foundation for the family upon which to build the American genealogy. This all may occupy one chapter of the book to be written.

This chapter must be more or less traditional, with a faith­ful attempt at the truth. Dates are faulty and scarce due to the fact that the most complete and practically the only records available are those of the church and the probate court. It was of no consequence when a child was born, but his baptism was a matter for church record. Neither was it important when a man died, but the church made record of his funeral and burial, and the court took cognizance of his will when it came in for probate. The contents of the will, many times, was all the history that survived the memory of the family. In it there was usually mention of wife and chil­dren and sometimes of in-laws and grandchildren. This was not always true, nor was it always safe to assume that the entire immediate family had been catalogued in the will. The assumption that a wife predeceased her husband or that a child died before its father was usually based on the ab­sence of the name from the will, which does not furnish any­thing like conclusive proof of the death of either wife or child.

It will readily be seen that any attempt to build up a com­plete family history line prior to the advent of the family into America is futile.

Most genealogists are satisfied to go back into England, or whatever other country mothered the family prior to their emigration to America, and briefly set down what is reason­ably supposed to be the early history of the family. Others are not satisfied until they have proved, to their own satis-
faction at least, the family line to Adam and Eve. After all, what is to be gained by trying to trace the ancestry of any one family back to the Garden of Eden pair? All families can lay claim to the same progenitors without further proof than the acceptance of the record in the first chapter of Genesis which states that all mankind and every family on earth had its origin with the same parents.

Inasmuch as the genealogist must hang strenuously to absolute facts, when a genealogy appears with a very elabor­ate account of the family history back into the exceedingly dim past, the question is bound to arise in the mind of the reader as to whether the author has dreamed as much concerning the history of the family since its advent into America, as he did its history prior to that time. If so, his record is dis­counted at the very beginning, and his exhaustive research for early beginnings will militate against his entire work.

The real genealogy of the family history should begin with the emigration of the family to America and the emigrant an­cestor should be numbered as the first generation. The fam­ily should have its feet firmly planted in the old country if possible. The ancestral home; the date of departure for America; the name of the ship bringing the ancestor to this country; the place of embarkation and debarkation, and the place of settlement should all be noted. These having been found and recorded, the history of the development of that particular family in America may be commenced.

At this point tradition is quite likely to appear. Perhaps the most common snag is that there were three brothers who came here, one settling in Massachusetts, one in Connecticut and the other either in Rhode Island or New York. While it is true that brothers, brothers and sisters, and fathers and sons, came to the new land and settled, it is not safe to as­sume, in place of any known fact to the contrary, because we find families of the same name in various parts of the new country who were contemporary, that they were close rela­tives who settled in these various places.

If the family history cannot be established before its advent into America, the genealogist should go back as far as he can for a beginning. His work can be numbered so that any genera­tions found at any time in the search which antedate his beginning point can be put in their proper places without in any way upsetting the arrangement of his work. A start may be made at any determined point and can be worked both forward and backward so long as data can be found.

The work will be simpler if it is found that only one emi­grant of the same surname came to America in the early days. One of the hardest tasks facing the genealogist is the separation of early families by the same surname. An in­stance is found in the Barker Genealogy where eight distinct families named Barker came to America, which are sum­marized thus:

There was James born in Essex County, Eng., in i6ij who came in 1634. and joined his sister Christiana who married Nicholas Easton and settled in Newport, Rhode Island. James was one of the petitioners for a tract of land which is now Wes­terly, R. I., and settled there. Edward Barker was born about 1625, was said to have come from England in 1640, and was a well-known merchant in i6jo in New Haven, Conn. Robert Barker and his brother John were among the early ad­venturers in Plymouth, Mass. They settled in what is now Pernbroke, Mass. John moved into that part of Plymouth which was later set off as the town of Duxbury and in 1638 he moved to Marshfield, Mass. Richard Parker, with his wife Joanna settled, and is the only citizen known to have been in Andover, Mass.y in 164.3. James Barker and his wife Grace and their son Barzillai were, with his brother Thomas and wife Mary, among those twenty Puritan families who came from England under the leadership of Rev. Ezekiel Rogers, and who were described by him as "Godly men and the most of them of good estate.'' They arrived in Salem, Mass., in December of 1638. Thomas died without issue Novem­ber 11, 1650. In 1682 William Penn came to America on the ship Welcome and with him came his friend Samuel Barker who belonged to the society of Friends. On March 2jth, 1685, a grant was made to William Penn of two hundred acres of land and purchased by Samuel Barker. It was located in what is now Newcastle County, Delaware. While there were Barkers in Virginia as early as 1624, the first record found of James Barker is that he was born in Eng­land in 1^26 and came to America soon after his marriage in 1751. There were other Barkers in Virginia which the genealo­gist has not connected with the above James.

It will be seen at once that to segregate these various families and not mix them in succeeding generations adds tremendously to the work of the genealogist.

If this condition prevails in the family under consideration, it will first be necessary to determine whether to attempt the larger work of recording all the families found or only one of them.

It will sometimes be found that all of the family in America have descended from one ancestor; that there is only record of one emigrant bearing the surname, or if others came they died without leaving issue. This very much simplifies the work of the family historian.

It must always be borne in mind that the pursuit of gene­alogical knowledge may be made as simple, or as complex as it is desired. One line can be followed from a common an­cestor. If there were in the emigrant family seven children who grew to maturity and had families, all of those families can be picked up in the father and worked down, or the fam­ily of any one of the seven children may be run and the others left alone. If only one line is run well, it is a valuable contribution to history. Rather than to begin too discourag­ing a work, it is suggested that only one line be attempted at a time. With the recommended system of numbering, lines can be added sufficient to engage the most ambitious worker.

It is the usual practice to follow one common ancestor down the family history. That being all that interests the subsequent genera­tions of that ancestor, or the record of whom they will care to purchase. This seems the fairer way for the purchaser of the finished book. It is true that Dea. Gregory Stone and Dea. Simon Stone were brothers and both emigrated to America, but the descendants of Dea. Gregory are not es­pecially interested in the family of Dea. Simon, and they should not be asked to purchase the history of both families to get the half that records their own branch of the Stone family in America. To print two separate and distinct his­tories, it was necessary to publish verbatim in both books the preliminary chapter having to deal with the Stone family prior to their coming to America, but even so, the author has shown good judgment in publishing separately the two families.

The other extreme may be found in the Barker Genealogy referred to above, where eight or more lines were combined in one large volume. There was no attempt by the compiler to join any of the various families except those of Robert and John, and they were both born before their emigration. The only string that ties together the various families reviewed is that of name. It is fair to ask how much the Barkers originating in Plymouth County, Mass., are interested in the Barkers of Delaware or Virginia. The cost of so large a vol­ume must have prevented many from purchasing it and deprived them of the history of their own family. If the same material had been bound in a separate volume for each family of the name a far greater distribution would probably have been secured and perhaps a larger financial re­turn.

These are matters to which the genealogist must give care­ful consideration.

Dropped Lines

The next important point is to consider whether lines are to be carried along after the female members of the family have married and changed their surname.

The common practice is to drop female lines as soon as they have been properly established in the families of their husbands. If this plan is followed, the name of a daughter should be entered in its order with other children of the fam­ily, after which should follow the date of her birth and death, the date of her marriage, the name of the man to whom she was married, his parentage with the maiden name of his mother, the date of his birth and death, and the list of their children with the dates of their birth, thus:

Mary J.,

born Mar. 4, 1834 at Boston; died June 21, 1895 at Chicago; married Sept. 6, 1856 at Boston, Robert M., son of John and Mary (Jones) Smith, born July 30, 1833 at Cambridge, Mass.; died Feb. 11, 1901 at Chicago, 111. Children: Robert J., born at Chicago, 111., Oct. 21, 1859. Lucy M., born Evanston, 111., June 13, 1861.

The name of Mary J. is not carried any further in the work on the family history. She is now considered a Smith, and sufficient Smith infor­mation is given to enable any one interested in her to select her line in the Smith genealogy where she may be followed down with her particular family. However, she was still the daughter of her father and his blood still flowed in her veins. Her children have as much of the blood of her father in their veins as have those of her brothers whose names are carried along and their history written into the book. The unfor­tunate part of this practice is, that when the reader is re­ferred to the Smith genealogy for further knowledge of this branch of the family, he is confronted with the fact that there is no Smith genealogy containing this branch of the family in existence, and that when Mary J. was dropped from the genealogy of her father's family, she was dropped out of all knowledge so far as any record goes. It will be found that there is not a genealogy for one in twenty of the lines that have to be dropped by this plan. The result is, that a large part of the family whose history is being written, remains still unrecorded after the family history is finished and published.

This plan is not a history of a family, but the history of those members of a family who have not lost the family sur­name by marriage. It is the difference between the history of a name, and that of the blood of a common ancestor.

The difference in the amount of work involved is tre­mendous. While the plan of carrying male lines of the name, and dropping female lines when the surname changes, has every thing in its favor from the point of view of labor in­volved, still there is aroused a feeling of sympathy for the daughters of a family who pay the penalty for being girls and getting married, by being dropped and forgotten in their family history, while the brave deeds and numerous poster­ity of their more fortunate brothers are spread on the record, a record that is as much the family of daughters as of sons.

Another point raised, is that of the record of issue and heirship. Perhaps the greatest real value of a genealogy is its legal aspect in tracing title to property. In this relation it may be the determining factor in the settlement of land titles involving the homes and property of an entire community. Many old country farms which descended to heirs years ago are now city plats on which are built hundreds of homes. A genealogy that can enumerate all the heirs of the old owner of one of these farms may well be worth its weight in gold in deciding the validity of the title of such ancestral land. Many a title searcher has been driven to distraction to find, when looking for the heirs of a long departed land owner, that the family genealogy carefully carried down the fam­ilies of the sons, only to say that there were daughters who married and left families. Their offspring to the present generation are just as truly the heirs of the ancient land owner as are the offspring bearing the family name. The genealogy as a book of reference may prove its worth in many and varied way, which must be considered by the compiler.

It has been the practice of some genealogists to follow down favored female lines whose history would seem to lend glory to the family, and drop the less fortunate. This al­ways seems like gallery play and a plan to be discouraged as lowering the dignity of the entire work. The matter of ac­complishment is not necessarily the mark of superiority of intellect or ability, but may be, and often is, but a condition of circumstances and environment.

The genealogist doing a family history should have a keen sense of fair play, and while he has to deal with the noble and the sordid; those who are inconspicuous and those who have risen high in the at­tention of the world, there is no place in his work for con­tumely or braggadocio.

The plan of carrying male lines, and dropping female lines as soon as they are established in the families of their hus­bands, or the plan of carrying all lines in so far as they can be found, the limit of search determining the stopping point, should be decided upon and followed consistently.

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