Why Genealogy Is at the Heart of Everything

What decades of tracing my own family taught me about who gets to keep a record, and who doesn't.

OPENING NOTE

I was eleven or twelve years old the first time my Nana started teaching me who we came from. It didn't happen over a single conversation. It happened on visits, when she'd take me and my younger brother with her to see her aunts and uncles, nine siblings, and ten first cousins. In those living rooms the stories would just start, memories of relatives who'd already passed, a name mentioned in passing that turned into twenty minutes of who that person actually was. There was no internet, no searchable database, no DNA kit in the mail. Just rooms full of people who remembered, and a kid listening, remembering, and taking notes because she wanted to know more than any one visit could tell her.

Those visits turned into family archival gathering. Letters. Photos. Hours in library departments that smelled like old paper, looking for one name in a stack of records nobody had touched in years. More than four decades later, the tools have changed completely. FamilySearch didn't exist. AncestryDNA didn't exist. What I felt the first time I found a name I'd been looking for hasn't changed at all.

MAIN PIECE

Here's what I know now that I didn't know at eleven: every record is a decision about who counted. Not in the abstract, in the actual paperwork. The census taker who didn't bother writing down a full name. The county clerk who kept meticulous vital records for one family and none at all for the family enslaved on the same land. Every time I find something, I'm also standing in front of everything that was never written down in the first place.

I know this personally, not theoretically. On one branch of my PopPop’sfamily, I gathering more and more records confirming our lineage back to 412 AD, to Germany, to documented nobility, land grants, church registries that survived wars and centuries and continents. On another branch, from that same Virginia property, his family traces to two people enslaved in Farmville, Prince Edward County. And there, the paper trail just stops. Not because I gave up looking. Because the records that would carry that line back further were never kept, or the people keeping records never thought it was worth the ink.

Both of those branches are mine. Only one of them was considered worth writing down.

That's the sentence this piece is actually named for. Genealogy is at the heart of everything Vysyons does because it's where I learned, before I had language for any of it, that record-keeping is never neutral. Someone decides what gets documented, what gets preserved, what gets handed forward, and what gets left to disappear. That's not a genealogy problem. That's the exact problem every one of my other pillars deals with too, just wearing different clothes.

Take communications. Every time I write for a client, I'm making the same decision a county clerk made two hundred years ago: what gets included, what gets left out, whose version of events becomes the official one. The difference is I know what's at stake when that decision gets made carelessly, because I've spent decades standing in the gap it leaves behind. That's why I care so much about getting a client's story exactly right instead of the version that sounds better. A story simplified is a story that erases something, usually the part that was hardest to find in the first place.

Take events. My family didn't do formal reunions before 1991. We gathered for birthdays, funerals, weddings, holidays, whatever came up, but nothing built on purpose to bring everyone together at once. Before my Nana passed in December 1989, she asked me to keep the family together. I took that literally. I took it seriously. After a year and a half of snail mail, expensive phone calls, and in-person meetings, in the summer of 1991 we held our first family reunion.

That event didn't happen because I understood event planning professionally. It happened because I understood what would be lost if nobody built the space on purpose. That's the same thing I think about every time I design an event now: who's actually in it, what gets said out loud while there's still time to say it, and what disappears if nobody does the work of gathering people who'd otherwise just drift into occasional contact. An event, done with real intention, is a live record-keeping act. My first one just happened to also be a promise.

Take publishing. This is maybe the most direct line of all. Deciding what gets written down and given a permanent form is a publishing decision, whether it's a family Bible, a court record, or a book. The county clerk who skipped a name was making an editorial choice. So is every publisher, every editor, every writer, every time they decide what belongs on the page and what gets cut. I didn't come to publishing work from a marketing angle. I came to it already knowing exactly what it costs when the wrong things get left out.

Communications is deciding what story gets told. Events are deciding what gets witnessed while there's still time. Publishing is deciding what gets a permanent form. Genealogy is what taught me that all three of those decisions carry real weight, because I've spent my whole life living on both sides of what happens when they're made carelessly, and when they're made with care.

September is Legacy Month here, and it's carrying into October too, because there was too much I wanted to say to fit it into thirty days. The coming weeks go deeper into what this research actually looks like, the methodology, the archives, the specific walls Black family history keeps running into, and the tools that are helping and the ones that are quietly disappearing.

CLOSING TAKEAWAY

I'm still keeping that promise to my Nana, thirty-five years later, just in more forms than she probably imagined when she made me the one who'd hold it.

WORTH NOTING

If you're new to genealogy research and don't know where to start check with your local library to see if they have a genealogical department, and if they know of genealogical societies in your area. Just because I live in New Orleans it doesn’t mean that the resources and people I work with cannot and have not helped me research ancestors in other places.

One large resource to consider is the Family History Library in Salt Lake City which has the largest collection of genealogical records in the world, and much of it is accessible online for free through FamilySearch.org. For Black family history specifically, the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society is a strong starting point, at aahgs.org.