Around the world, we're all family
Beverly Smith Vorpahl The Spokesman-ReviewThere's more to belonging to a family than one might imagine. First, there's our childhood family, then the family with our mates and children, followed by the children's spouses and their children. Fast behind comes the extended family of siblings and their spouses, children and grandchildren.
The next ring of my family is the Canadian cousins. I'd come away from our biannual "Wing Fling" with a strong sense of belonging to something much larger than myself.
Love of family is the vigor behind my love of genealogy, sparked by the stories my mom and her cousin discussed about their grandparents' 1900 emigration to the Northwest Territories. At one reunion, cousin Emma created a huge pedigree so we cousins many times removed could see exactly how we all shared an early set of grandparents born in the mid-1800s in Quebec: Hosea and Hulda Wing (hence "Wing Fling").
Beyond sentimentality, kinship is a physical matter because of the genes (the first syllable in "genealogy") found in our makeup, defining who we are and where we came from.
In the second edition of "Kinship: It's all Relative," Jackie Smith Arnold writes that "families are based on kinship; members belong by blood (birth), by affinity (marriage) or through the courts (adoption)."
Arnold quotes the theory that "every person living today is descended from one African female who walked the Earth 140,000 to 280,000 years ago," making us "at least fiftieth cousins to every other person on Earth today."
That's another reason why we ought to love one another around the world - we're all family.
Arnold discusses the three types of families:
Family of Orientation: "Membership" comes with one's birth into the family of our parents and their relatives. "We are who we are because they are who they are," Arnold says. "From them we inherit our physical and emotional characteristics such as disposition, eye color, body structure and facial features." It's the only family that can't be chosen.
"We carry the inherited genes around like so much baggage and wouldn't mind a bit if parts of it were lost enroute," the author writes. "Even when we believe we have successfully performed self- surgery on certain characteristics, the child or grandchild arrives as a reminder that the tendencies are waiting in the wings."
That's why we see our parents in the mirror. Even if they're dead and buried, something of them lives on through us.
Family of Procreation: This family comes through marriage, created by choice. "It's within this family, if all goes well, we create our own descendants and become somebody's ancestor," Arnold writes. "Kinship is what makes the world go round. Through the family of procreation we are promoted from child of our parents to parent of our children. Our parents become grandparents, considered by some to be a fringe benefit of being a parent in the first place.
Family of Affinity: This family also comes through marriage as the family of your spouse - your in-laws.
"All blood relatives of your spouse become your affinity relatives," Arnold writes, "and by adding the term `in-law' or the phrase `by marriage,' we instantly identify to the world their place in our kinship circle."
Genealogically speaking, there's a sense of security, and a sense of pride, knowing we belong to a family, Arnold writes.
"Experts study overlapping pedigrees to show that we are all members of the largest kinship group in existence - the family of man," Arnold writes. "Horizontal genealogy creates some strange bedfellows. For instance, Jimmy Carter and Richard Nixon are sixth cousins, while Richard Nixon and George Bush are 10th cousins once removed. Wouldn't that make an interesting family reunion?"
Copyright 2000 Cowles Publishing Company
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