Today's Feature Article
The "Game" of Genealogy
by Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG
I joined a Scrabble club a while back. I've been a fan of the game for most of my life, but all my Scrabble partners had died or moved off. So, hot diggety! I thought, when I read the news that a club was forming locally. At last! Somebody to play with!
Oh, what a surprise I had at that first meeting. These guys were serious players. They played competitively. Lackadaisical Lizzie was definitely not in their league--nor did I want to be. I just wanted to play for fun.
The irony of the moment did not escape me. As a genealogist, I've always been a "serious player." I'm one of those people others complain about when they say, "I'm just doing this for fun."
Not that I'm in some competitive league as a genealogist, you understand. Genealogy is not a competition. That's why "just-for-fun genealogists," when describing their frustration over the "serious players" they have to deal with, grope for some word other than the one I applied to my new Scrabble friends: competitive . "Professional" is the word genealogists usually settle on, as in: "I'm not a professional. I'm just doing this for fun."
Okay. That's fine. No one should ever be a professional genealogist who doesn't want to be. The problem is that genealogy isn't Scrabble. Aside from the obvious point that, whatever our motivation for genealogy, it should be fun (life is just to short to waste on pursuits that aren't, right?), genealogy and the game of Scrabble have just about zilch in common.
The other thing I discovered in my new Scrabble club was that there are all sorts of esoteric things I had never learned and, quite frankly, felt I could live my life without ever knowing. Stuff like nonsensical words that have no use in life whatsoever, aside from enabling Scrabblers to play out their hand, regardless of the letters they're stuck with. Seriously now, how many times in life am I going to use "U-less Q words" like "qophs" or cool "U-dumps" like "fugu"? If I did use them in any thing I wrote, it's a sure bet my editor would zap them before I ever got to show the real world what all I had learned in my Scrabble club.
Genealogy, on the other hand, has no arbitrary end at which we're stuck holding letters. We can play as long as we choose. We can keep right on acquiring new letters until we are able to play the very hand we have been hoping for. If we do choose to fold, there's no penalty. The only penalty we face in genealogy comes from breaking the one basic rule this game has: get it right.
What's more, in genealogy we're all playing on the same side. There's no offense and no defense. Whether we're working on our own family or whether we're "professionals" who study other people's families as well as our own, the objective is not a "gotcha." We're all working together toward the same goal: get it right. Following that rule, all the other stuff we learn and say and do are not really rules at all, they're just steps we take along the way toward getting it right.
At soul-searching moments in the weeks that followed my initiation into the Scrabble club, one question nagged me: Am I applying a double-standard? If I'm not willing to expend the effort to memorize weird words like "aalii" so I can play Scrabble "seriously," should I be at genealogy's pulpit urging "just-for-fun" genealogists to play the same game as those they consider "professionals"?
The answer is obvious. I've already said it. Genealogy is not Scrabble. The biggest difference between the two is the matter of consequences. My just-for-fun Scrabble plays aren't posted on the Internet for the whole world to download and nobody will draw from them their sense of identity. My unfortunate misspellings don't become Holy Writ that everyone passes on as Gospel, just because I said so and because somebody thinks it's not nice to question me--or because the ubiquitous "they" wouldn't let me publish it if it weren't so.
In my just-for-fun Scrabble games, I can guess at words and hope they'll check out okay when a tough opponent goes to the dictionary. My conscience can be perfectly content because nobody is going to take my play and go cross-country to try to build a better play off what I've guessed at. Nor will endless others spend thousands of dollars and thousands of hours trying to prove that the word I invented, while I was "having fun," really must exist or else I would not have played it.
Amid the fun we're having, if we liken genealogy to a game, it's definitely not Scrabble we're playing--it's Truth or Consequences. Amid that fun, we also face a serious thought: Whatever consequences we suffer for our bad plays are not just consequences for us and us alone. They are imposed upon everyone else we play with, upon everyone who trusts that our garbled accounts are indeed the truth.
Truth is, genealogy is a serious pursuit. It's only when a player does not take it seriously and creates a mess on the game board for others to clean up, that all the fun is lost amid the consequences.
Elizabeth Shown Mills, CG, CGL, FASG, and author of Evidence! Citation & Analysis for the Family Historian, freely admits that the folly of just-for fun genealogy is a consequence she learned the hard way. Since that epiphany, she has measured her success as a family historian not by how many ancestors she has put on her charts or how many names she has in her database, but by how well the plays she has made since then has withstood "checking" by everyone else.
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