Family Heritage Definition
"Family heritage" describes broad categories related to genealogy, family trees and ethnicity. Historical research into your "family tree" can add insight into why your family lives in a particular part of the country, where certain traditions came from or even whether you can join certain clubs.
Other People Are Reading
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Documentation
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Birth and death records provide documentation for family heritage research. Research into family history relies frequently on documentation to prove facts about families, parents, children and ancestors. Documentation includes government records such as military, census, land, court, marriage and death records. It also can include newspaper accounts and handwritten memories from older relatives.
Misconceptions
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Researchers use records of marriage certificates frequently in family heritage studies. Family heritage oral and written information can often be wrong. Traditional oral stories can be embellished, and wrong written information can quickly spread to many people without being verified with documentation. In addition, language translation problems have caused confusion over the years. An example: Pennsylvania Dutch are often actually "deutsche," or German, according to the Pennsylvania German Society.
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Famous Ties
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Research into your family can reveal ethnicities you may not know of. Research into your own or others' family trees can show an illuminating melting pot of family ties, especially in the United States. With strong research, people sometimes find that their Irish ancestors were actually Scottish, or what they thought were only African American ancestors actually had Anglo-Saxon branches (or vice versa).
Benefits
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DNA carries family traits from one generation to another. Knowing the medical history of your family heritage can have benefits to you. Finding patterns of particular illness and disease in your family can help you know what tendencies might "run in the family," giving you an opportunity to avoid risk factors, and giving your doctor information that could help with diagnoses.
Help from Religious Institutions
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Bible and church records can help with family heritage research. In addition to documentation through government records, many family heritage researchers find out facts through religious records, such as family Bibles or church records. Different denominations place different emphasis on these records. Members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints consider genealogy as part of their religion, and gather and keep vast records.
Warning
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Take care in judging information from the Internet and other people when doing your family heritage research. The advent of widespread Internet use helped researchers share family heritage information, but it also allowed the quick sharing of inaccurate information. Use caution when judging other people's research into your own family tree, and carefully check the citations of documents they used in their research before accepting information as fact.
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References
Resources
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