Ancestoring: Understanding Records, Family, and Ourselves

Ancestoring helps us to dig deeper by asking, “Why?” Here we learn to appreciate records as the starting point—not the conclusion—of studying prior generations, and to engage in objective thinking that helps us understand historical contexts and solve problems by analyzing situations.

This guide is divided into three parts: Understanding Records, Understanding Family, and Understanding Ourselves. In Part One, Understanding Records, Ms. Posz affirms the importance of source analysis and record analysis as the foundational principles of genealogy. She discusses the importance of placing a record—a photograph, an obituary, a magazine article, etc.—in its historical setting. Learning to observe records carefully and with detachment is another critical faculty genealogists must develop.

Part Two, Understanding Family, underscores bringing an open mind to our ancestors’ behavior, especially behavior that was frowned upon by their contemporaries. As Ms. Posz states, “Recognizing where our own prejudices and biases . . . affect our evaluation of their evidence can counterbalance our worst impulses.”

Part Three, Understanding Ourselves, asks readers to examine how our memories, among other things, can obscure our understanding of the past. Ms. Posz also asks the reader to consider, “If this had been you, what records would you have generated? What records would you have destroyed or hidden?” And we might add, “Why?”

This work reveals how our ancestors’ everyday activities, those spaces between events worthy of generating a document for us to find later, offer lessons about their decisions. Connect with the people that you research by asking “why” to better understand them. Purposefully apply abstract thinking though exercises that highlight unconscious biases. These methods can help us to form and test theories, to understand and solve problems, and to mentally structure our research. By peeling back layers of evidence created over multiple lifetimes and analyzing our findings, we see that at the core of our work is never just the story of our ancestors, but steps toward understanding ourselves as well.

“Ancestoring is . . . a remarkable step-by-step tutorial that will guide us when we are called by our ancestors to discover more about them: a beautiful roadmap of how to engineer our searches at a much more layered and deeper level. It dazzled my mind and warmed my heart.” — Henry Z. (Hank) Jones, FASG, author of Psychic Roots: Serendipity & Intuition in Genealogy

Darcie Hind Posz

2026, 6" x 9", paper, index, 180 pp.

ISBN: 9780806322100

102-4677