The Family Tree
By Terence L. Day
Terence L. Day, genealogist and journalist, is on the Washington State University faculty. He welcomes e-mail at genealogy@moscow.com, or regular mail in care of the Tri-City Herald City newsroom, P.O. Box 2608, Tri-Cities, WA 99302-2608.
It's time to come to terms with terms
This column was published Aug. 18, 1996
Last weekend, while writing a section of my family history on the Western immigration of the Day family, I ran headlong into an emotionally wrenching decision I wasn't prepared to make.
How do I treat the halves in my family?
There is James Johnson McKenzie, half brother to Rufus Morgan Day, Jemima Day and my great-grandfather Theodore Barber Day.
And then there are my half sister and brother, Christy Vinnedge Geyer and David Willis Vinnedge. It is about them that my guts were tied in a knot.
I've always hated the venerable genealogical terms, half brother and half sister. Too much the literalist, I can't decide which half of them is related to me, so just claim the whole person. As long as memory serves I've been unsettled whenever someone uses the divisive term.
Step is no better. Stepdaughter, stepson, stepfather, stepmother.... What abominable terms. And in-law terminology is even worse.
Genealogy isn't about dividing families, it is about uniting them.
Yet, when I got down to my generation and the places to which it has dispersed, the problem of halves had me in a full nelson, shoving my face into the hard biological facts of families.
I had to accept defeat with what little dignity remained. My challenge is to write in a way future generations will understand that in my heart, halves and steps are inclusive, uniting terms, not divisive terms that set some apart from others.
Sophisticated writers and readers of genealogies have to cope not only with these, but other terms that can be misleading -even causing genealogists to bark up the wrong tree at times.
Too often, we forget the meanings of words change. There also are colloquial meanings - unique uses according to local custom. Today "junior" and "senior" are narrowly used to identify a father and son of the same given name, but not long ago in some parts of the country the terms were used to signify two men of the same name in the same community, even though they may not be related.
In some instances, a son named after a nephew or uncle, might be referred to as "junior," and the honored relative as "senior." Old records didn't always clearly differentiate between in-laws and stepchildren. Especially in the South, even brother and sister were loosely used, but no term has been so haphazardly applied as that of "cousin."
Careful genealogists tread cautiously when encountering these terms, even in legal documents. Do they really represent a biological, or at least social, family relationship? Or were they used merely as terms of respect and friendship?
As much as I would like to refer to Christy and David as sister and brother, unqualified, as a careful genealogist, I cannot mislead future generations or relatives far down the shirt tail.
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