People bought and sold

property, were members of churches, married, left wills,

mustered in and out, drew pensions, paid taxes. At every

turn there was documentation, carefully filed in those

temples to the law, our county courthouses. Those

records, plus census registers, provide the clues we use

today to trace the connections within our own families

- connections that link us to the history of our

nation and ultimately of the whole human race.

A second cousin once

removed on my father's side decided to organize our first

family reunion in Savannah this summer. She has four

aunts and uncles, more cousins than she probably knows,

and me. I'm her father's and her aunts' and uncles' only

cousin. I'm also the only one who has researched family

history at all and the only one of my generation who is

even moderately computer literate. Therefore, my

contribution to the event is expected to be a rendering

of the Dimmick family tree.

My cousins, older than I by

at least 10 years, have provided me with the vital data

of their numerous children, children-in-law,

grandchildren and, in several instances, great-grands.

The family tree in some of its branches is more like a

family briar patch, hacked and tangled by divorce and

remarriage, but I'm confident I can clearly represent who

is currently kin to whom and how.

It's the other end of the

continuum that has me buffaloed. My father's mom,

abandoned with two toddlers by her ne'er-do-well husband,

died young. I've found her death records, but no trace of

her birth, confirmation or marriage. Her parents are

unknown.

As for her husband's

parents, I have their names, church attendance records,

obituaries, and burial sites, but nothing to connect them

to their own progenitors. Where's their paper trail? I go

only two generations back, and become a historian without

a history, a genealogist without her own paternal

pedigree

I forced that literary ploy

a trifle because, lacking any genealogical success to

trumpet, I have a vignette I've been saving to share with

you. It should appeal both to the researchers among you

and to those who share my passion for words. This is the

pedigree of the word "pedigree," and I thank

Dave Hamrick for forwarding it to me when it came across

his desktop.

As we use the word today,

"pedigree" means ancestral lineage, and/or a

genealogical chart made to show such a line of descent.

But where did that curious word come from? From the

Middle English "pedegru," my well-worn

Webster's says, which in turn came from Middle French

"pi� de grue." The literal translation is

"foot of a crane."

Now the symbol of a tree

has been around for a while to illustrate the way a

family is formed. You choose a single individual,

yourself, for example, as the trunk. Your roots are your

two parents, your four grandparents, your eight

great-grandparents, and on as far as you wish to go. (By

this method, my tree will be lopsided, with loads of

roots identified on Mom's side, hardly any on Daddy's.)

Then you graft on your

spouse (whose roots are lost in this particular system

- but few symbols work perfectly) and begin to

branch out with your children and their spouses, then

their children, until your tree stands tall and full and

nicely balanced.

Except for the Mormons to

whom it has serious religious significance, the quest to

chronicle our ancestry ranges from being essentially a

hobby to a virtual obsession, with most of us dabbling as

time allows and success motivates. But at other times in

history, pedigrees were critically important to prove

inheritance rights or ethnic authenticity. After the

Norman conquest of England, for example, people paid to

have charts drawn up to claim estates or titles.

You can illustrate the

simplest family connections with pronged lines between

the names on the page. A three-lined mark forms a

"Y," for instance, with the top extensions

pointing to the parents, the single stem at the bottom

representing the child.

In the 14th century,

experts who were employed to help prove a line of descent

began to use a similar symbol, an inverted "V"

with a vertical line bisecting it and extending upwards

to mark the central family line. Can you picture it? It

looks like a three-pronged rake, or, say, a bird's foot

with three splayed-out toes.

It looks like the foot of a

crane.

The word was spelled and

pronounced a number of ways before it became

"pedigree." It was pronounced

"pee-de-grew" in 15th-century England, and

variously spelled "petiegrew,"

"pytagru," even "peti degree."

So there you have it: the

pedigree of "pedigree." I wish mine could be

limned so easily. And preferably before July.

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