BY SALLIE SATTERTHWAITE
Lifestyle Columnist

While the paper trails left by our ancestors were nowhere near as knee-deep as those we are accustomed to today, such trails did indeed exist.

People bought and sold property, were members of churches, married, left wills, mustered in and out, drew pensions, paid taxes. At every turn there was documentation, carefully filed in those temples to the law, our county courthouses. Those records, plus census registers, provide the clues we use today to trace the connections within our own families — connections that link us to the history of our nation and ultimately of the whole human race.

A second cousin once removed on my father's side decided to organize our first family reunion in Savannah this summer. She has four aunts and uncles, more cousins than she probably knows, and me. I'm her father's and her aunts' and uncles' only cousin. I'm also the only one who has researched family history at all and the only one of my generation who is even moderately computer literate. Therefore, my contribution to the event is expected to be a rendering of the Dimmick family tree.

My cousins, older than I by at least 10 years, have provided me with the vital data of their numerous children, children-in-law, grandchildren and, in several instances, great-grands. The family tree in some of its branches is more like a family briar patch, hacked and tangled by divorce and remarriage, but I'm confident I can clearly represent who is currently kin to whom and how.

It's the other end of the continuum that has me buffaloed. My father's mom, abandoned with two toddlers by her ne'er-do-well husband, died young. I've found her death records, but no trace of her birth, confirmation or marriage. Her parents are unknown.

As for her husband's parents, I have their names, church attendance records, obituaries, and burial sites, but nothing to connect them to their own progenitors. Where's their paper trail? I go only two generations back, and become a historian without a history, a genealogist without her own paternal pedigree

I forced that literary ploy a trifle because, lacking any genealogical success to trumpet, I have a vignette I've been saving to share with you. It should appeal both to the researchers among you and to those who share my passion for words. This is the pedigree of the word “pedigree,” and I thank Dave Hamrick for forwarding it to me when it came across his desktop.

As we use the word today, “pedigree” means ancestral lineage, and/or a genealogical chart made to show such a line of descent. But where did that curious word come from? From the Middle English “pedegru,” my well-worn Webster's says, which in turn came from Middle French “pi» de grue.” The literal translation is “foot of a crane.”

Now the symbol of a tree has been around for a while to illustrate the way a family is formed. You choose a single individual, yourself, for example, as the trunk. Your roots are your two parents, your four grandparents, your eight great-grandparents, and on as far as you wish to go. (By this method, my tree will be lopsided, with loads of roots identified on Mom's side, hardly any on Daddy's.)

Then you graft on your spouse (whose roots are lost in this particular system — but few symbols work perfectly) and begin to branch out with your children and their spouses, then their children, until your tree stands tall and full and nicely balanced.

Except for the Mormons to whom it has serious religious significance, the quest to chronicle our ancestry ranges from being essentially a hobby to a virtual obsession, with most of us dabbling as time allows and success motivates. But at other times in history, pedigrees were critically important to prove inheritance rights or ethnic authenticity. After the Norman conquest of England, for example, people paid to have charts drawn up to claim estates or titles.

You can illustrate the simplest family connections with pronged lines between the names on the page. A three-lined mark forms a “Y,” for instance, with the top extensions pointing to the parents, the single stem at the bottom representing the child.

In the 14th century, experts who were employed to help prove a line of descent began to use a similar symbol, an inverted “V” with a vertical line bisecting it and extending upwards to mark the central family line. Can you picture it? It looks like a three-pronged rake, or, say, a bird's foot with three splayed-out toes.

It looks like the foot of a crane.

The word was spelled and pronounced a number of ways before it became “pedigree.” It was pronounced “pee-de-grew” in 15th-century England, and variously spelled “petiegrew,” “pytagru,” even “peti degree.”

So there you have it: the pedigree of “pedigree.” I wish mine could be limned so easily. And preferably before July.

Back to the Top of the PageBack to the Weekend Home Page