Anglo-Saxon kings traced their ancestry to Woden, then kept going to Adam
Confucius has the largest surviving family tree on Earth, kept for more than 2,500 years. At the other extreme, English royal chroniclers simply invented descent from the god Woden, and later stretched it back to Noah and Adam. Genealogy has always mixed careful record-keeping with flattering fiction.
Genealogy is the study of families and lineages, using interviews, archives, DNA and other records to prove who descends from whom. Strictly, a family tree follows one person's descendants while a family history follows their ancestors, though the labels are used loosely. The Society of Genealogists distinguishes the two by defining genealogy as proving the links between generations and family history as the wider biography of a proven family and its community.
For most of Western history the subject served power. Pedigrees of kings and nobles backed claims to land, wealth and thrones, overlapping with heraldry's coats of arms. Rulers in Japan and across the Indo-European world, from Scandinavia to India, claimed gods among their forebears, and court genealogists preserved or fabricated the necessary links. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle's Woden ancestry is now regarded as invention, and the Christian-era extension back to biblical patriarchs had the added bonus of linking kings to the lineage of Jesus.
Genealogy has also been used to exclude. The American one-drop rule classed anyone with a single black ancestor as black and was written into state laws such as the Racial Integrity Act of 1924, and Nazi Germany relied on ancestry documents to decide who counted as Jewish or Aryan.
Today the motives are broader. Ancestry.com advertising, television shows, online archives and cheap DNA tests have made it easy for the curious to start, including adoptees searching for lost origins. Probate lawyers use it to find heirs, detectives use DNA genealogy to identify victims and offenders, and families trace hereditary illness. Some countries, including Ireland and Greece, grant citizenship through a grandparent born there. For New Zealand Māori, learning whakapapa is part of learning who you are, and the Latter-day Saints research ancestors because of their doctrine of baptism for the dead.
Source: Genealogy
