Family History Versus Genealogy

The other day, I was thinking about how I see my research into the various families that make up my extended family.

I have never been one to limit myself to direct or purely biological lines.  I'm interested in the bigger picture, the 'family bush' rather than the family tree.

In my mind (and this is just MY perspective here), genealogy is the search for the names, dates, places related to a person's direct family lines.  The goal seems to be to gather names back as many generations as possible without trying to fill in the rest of the story.

Family History (again, just my way of thinking about it) is trying to discover the personalities and the stories of the people who make up a family.  This broader interest sends me questing after details that fill out a person's biography without regard for whether the information takes the line back another generation.  It also means that I am interested in the stories of people not directly related to me, but who are in some way a part of the various families that tie in with the people who I consider to be my family.

So I find myself pursuing all sorts of interesting tangents.  These tangents are more fun for me than simply adding another generation to my family tree.  So I discover Poor Frank and the Six Wives of Ralph Tilley.  I learn about Florence Dulaney and her husband, Albert S. Willis, Ambassador to Hawaii.  I gather together pieces of the stories of people held in slavery by ancestors or their neighbors.  And I post lots of old photos just in case doing so is helpful to another researcher some day, even if I don't have any connection to them.

Puzzling through the clues and piecing together the stories keeps me interested.  There seems to be no end to the lines I can pursue and the mysteries to be solved.