Genealogy 101: A Chance to Learn About Your Ancestry
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| Rhonda Konig will lecture at Forest Lawn |
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| Some family trees have been maintained for considerable periods. The family tree of Confucius has been maintained for over 2,500 years and is listed in the Guinness Book of Records as the largest extant family tree. |
Rhonda Konig, a board member of the Western New York Genealogical Society and a Grosvenor Room librarian at Buffalo & Erie County’s Central Library, will give a lecture on genealogy at the chapel of the Forest Lawn Cemetery at 1411 Delaware Avenue in Buffalo on Sunday, January 5 at 2 pm.
Genealogy, also known as family history, is the study of families and the tracing of their lineages and history.
Konig will touch on the concepts of genealogy, types of records used, and an overview of resources available at the Grosvenor Room, which houses unique, rare and locally significant genealogical materials held by the Library. The Grosvenor collection is composed of 25,000 local history volumes, 5,500 genealogies, and thousands of documents that can aid people in tracing their ancestors.
Konig will discuss how genealogists use oral tradition, historical records, genetic analysis, and other records to obtain information about a family and demonstrate kinship and pedigrees of its members. The results are displayed in charts, trees, or written as narratives.
Genealogical research uses historical records and sometimes genetic analysis to demonstrate kinship.
Recently, the genealogy of first lady Michelle Obama was traced by a writer with the New York Times, Rachel L Swarns. According to Swarns, Michelle Obama's ancestry can be traced to a white slave owner, an Irish emigrant named Andrew Shields, who is Mrs. Obama's great-great-great-great-great-great-grandfather. His family were slave owners. Her great-great-great-grandmother Melvinia was a slave who had children by Charles Shields, grandson of Andrew Shields. One of those children, Dolphus Shields, born in 1859, was Michelle Obama's direct ancestor. DNA technology was used to prove the link and traced dozens of living, white cousins of Michelle Obama. Maybe its time to find out who your ancestors were and who your living relatives are.