genealogy feedback

From Mggoins:
Regarding your first item: "One adulteress can spoil the batch": men are unfaithful too, you know. I get what you were trying to say, but it comes off as very sexist.

Chip responds:
There's no doubt men cheat, but I focused on the consequences of a woman's infidelity for this reason: A man can create children all over the place, but he surely isn't going to bring these kids home to his legitimate household and expect his wife to pretend the child is hers. The cheating husband can create problems within another blood line without affecting his own. If a cheating woman becomes pregnant and doesn't reveal to husband (or anyone) that the child isn't or may not be his, the couple raises the child as its own and the blood line takes a detour. The genealogical line remains intact, in my opinion, since it charts families rather than DNA.

From Brad:
I enjoyed your page, especially the part about stories containing crazy aunts, bastard children and such. However, I disagree with your assertion that you can't trace back to Adam. It is possible, due to the fact that you can find a link to the patriarch lines of the first few thousands years listed in the book of Genesis. Of course, this is only if you believe that Adam lived a lot sooner than most think, and if you believe the Bible to be accurate. There's an interesting web site that charts the lineage from Adam (4026-3096 B.C.) to the Bible.
If you believe the Bible to be true, then everyone descends from (1) Adam and Eve, (2) Enoch (one of his descendants was Lamech, Noah's father) and (3) Noah. Because everyone but eight people were killed during Noah's time, there are no descendants of the Wicked that lived then. So it's not as unbelievable as it sounds.
To trace back to Adam, you first must trace to a royal line. Everyone descends from royalty, but unless your mother was the Queen of England, it's not that exciting to know that your ancestors include Charlemagne.
You should stick up for the Mormons. We're good people and don't deserve persecution from people like Dennis Rodman.

From Joe Louks:
Being an adoptive father I believe that the family that raises you has a stronger claim than blood. Bloodlines are for dogs and horses. I enjoy the history involved in genealogy — sometimes it's sad, and sometimes funny. For the most part I have found honest, hard-working people seeking the freedom to live without interference.

From Richard Waguespack:
The less moral a person's background, the less reliable the genealogy. Generally, those with the longer genealogy have more morals in their background. One can always be mistaken, but infidelity before the 20th century was not so rampant as you might imagine in upper-class Western cultures. I can say with almost complete certainty that the last five generations before me had no infidelity. Even going back 10 or 12 generations, it is likely that there was no infidelity.
Before the French Revolution, the French were in general highly moral people with a little proclivity to self indulgence. The English have been corrupt a little longer, because of the watering down of religion. Pockets of French intellectuals as well as some nobility were corrupt for a couple of centuries before the Revolution and these jackels share a great deal of the blame. The sensuous side of the French was always there, but in earlier times it was better directed and controlled.
There are signals that usually lend credence to legitimate births such baptismal records, marriage records, no irregularities in life narratives, rural settings rather than city settings, plantations rather than cities. Some plantations produced illegitimate children from slaves, but it is much more unusual in my view for Victorian women of Southern heritage (especially Catholic) to be unfaithful to their husbands. Social structures plus deep values equals fidelity — most of the time.

From Ray Girvan:
Very nice article in general, though I strongly agree with Mggoins' criticism. I would also suggest one more thing to hate about genealogy: lazy or obtrusive research methods. At the Devon History Society website, we had to stop accepting purely genealogical enquiries in the guestbook because it was being swamped by questions that either could be answered in a moment by a Google enquiry or else researchers were spamming the site without the enquirer having noticed that genealogy is not the focus of the DHS.
In my experience, family history researchers often wade in with a curt demand for information, simply because you have the same surname or live in the right district. Perhaps this impoliteness is one reason for your category "People don't care about the family history and so ignore you"?

From Mark Maynard:
Doing some rudimentary research into my family tree, I came across someone by the name of Thankful Maynard. I've been thinking about him quite a bit. Part of me uses his existence to prove that I, like him, will one day be reduced to a name. Those who rise up in history are very few. Even those who we think of today as world-famous will one day be nothing. I suspect that Clara Bow once had greater name recognition than Gwenyth Paltrow and where are her fans now? My guess is that no one now on earth will be remembered. We have no Gandhis, Lincolns, Mozarts, Einsteins or Shakespeares that I know of. That saddens me. It makes me wonder why we even try when all of our efforts turn to dust and blow away. I suppose it could be seen as a genetic battle, that Thankful Maynard, in name, was meaningless, but his genes live on, creating things like me to leave their mark.