Talk:Family history

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This is the talk page for discussing improvements to the Family history article.
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[edit] External Links

I have removed this section and added an internal link to genealogy software and List of general genealogy databases Gioto 14:57, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Family history - Wiki's?

I would have thought there would be a wiki resource available to conduct / store / present family histories? If there is one it should be mentioned. --Garrie 05:10, 2 August 2006 (UTC)

There isn't. What you are talking about is an elaboration of "collaborative family history", which has been discussed, but in my view does not work. Look at lineage-collecting schemes like WorldConnect: a lot of the content is wrong but unfixable. If you are talking about text histories, any 20th century material may raise privacy issues too. In addition, consider:
  • the economics: unlike Wikipedia articles, which have a writing and reading community of hundreds, most family histories have got just two, or one (or zero) family historians at work on them: the self-correction mechanisms take years or decades to take effect;
  • open-endedness: family histories are always unfinished building sites, with piles of stray data, gaps in data and wrong assumptions: collaboration only works with strong leadership;
  • standards: family history teems with faulty reasoning, faked lineages and flagrant plagiarism: serious historians won't participate without full documentation of each "fact", but most documents are proprietary and buried in databases where they cannot be linked to. --JB Piggin 21:39, 7 August 2006 (UTC)
JB makes a lot of good points. I'd wondered about the same project as you, Garriel. The best suggestion I can make is that some of the Surname pages function as repositories for ancient family history. Try finding interested parties there, and constructing a contact system in the talk pages. I'm not sure HOW to go about that, but there's probably a way to USE Wiki for contact without ABUSE. Good luck funding it. ThuranX 00:00, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
There is one wiki family history site at Rodovid.org, which supports GEDCOM upload and is currently trying to become a Wikimedia project. It has a veeeeery slow start (one living contributor so far, six billion to go), and I personally don't believe it is appropriate for a wiki for the reasons JBPiggin gave above, but I provide the link so you can see what it would look like and judge for yourself. GUllman 01:46, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
Thanks for outpointing Rodovid, GUllman. I took a look, and found the visuals impressive even if I'm not convinced about the concept. I guess we should watch it, and see how it copes in the real world (including banal stuff like financing).--JB Piggin 14:54, 8 August 2006 (UTC)
About this time eiother last year or two years ago, I can across one such site called Wiki-Tree where yuo could in oput family histories and family trees with as little information about any individual as their name, or as much as you could possibly write about then, masses of stuff if you knew it. That site appears to have vanished now, not sure where it wnet. It didn't seemt o have many people using it, but when I found it it was still fairly new. Evil Eye 12:21, 8 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Introduction of Family Health History

As we learn more about the human genome, genomics becomes more relavent to the discussion of Family History. In the context of Public Health Genomics, family history refers to health information about you and your close relatives. Family history is one of the most important risk factors for health problems like heart disease, stroke, diabetes and cancer. (A risk factor is anything that increases your chance of getting a disease.) See http://www.cdc.gov/genomics/public/famhistMain.htm for more information. Lid6 17:48, 15 September 2006 (UTC)

This page is not the place for that information. Please see disambig at top of article page, thank you. ThuranX 03:28, 16 September 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Is this really the right place?

It seems to me that this article really is covering the wider field of genealogy, and that family histories are a smaller subset, which seeks biographical information on your relations. In other words, a 'family tree', or chart, is genealogy, but an Ahnentafel, with jobs, towns, and so on, is closer to a 'family history'. Should we be considring a revision? ThuranX 22:28, 17 November 2006 (UTC)

[edit] Motivation?

Is there any reference for the generalization under motivation that most people in individualistic societies study family history to improve their self-esteem? While it might be true for a few, I don't think it applies to genealogists in general. It certainly isn't true for me. Foreverfreebird2 10:11, 8 January 2007 (UTC)foreverfreebird2