genealogy
/dʒiːnɪˈalədʒi
/ /dʒɛnɪˈalədʒi/noun (plural genealogies)
1A line of descent traced continuously from an ancestor: the genealogies of the kings of Mercia...
- Members of the caste keep family records and can trace a genealogy to a clan's mythical ancestors.
- The earliest surviving poems in old Irish are also praise poems, called fursundud, which trace back the genealogy of the kings of Ireland to Golamh or Mile Easpain, whose sons landed in Ireland at the end of the second millennium bce.
- It is hoped that these images will help families to trace their genealogies.
Synonyms
pedigree, ancestry, descent, lineage, line, line of descent, family tree, extraction, derivation, origin, heritage, parentage, paternity, birth, family, dynasty, house, race, strain, stock, breed, blood, bloodline, history, background, roots
rare stirps, filiation, stemma
1.1 [mass noun] The study and tracing of lines of descent.Like the heritage movement and the study of genealogy and local history, which underwent a similar boom, the new museums reflected a desire, not merely to learn about the past, but to re-enter it imaginatively....
- A debate on Radio Five this week focused on the incredible growth in the popularity of genealogy - the study of family trees.
- Like the swarms of people who flock to Web sites devoted to the study of genealogy, company owners who fall into their life's work through happenstance or inheritance may feel rootless, even disaffected.
1.2A plant’s or animal’s line of evolutionary development from earlier forms.However, theory predicts that in rapidly speciating taxa gene genealogies will vary between loci....
- In this context, the brown trout is an appropriate organism to study the utility of nuclear gene genealogies for evolutionary inferences.
- However, many viruses readily recombine, which implies that no single phylogenetic tree describes the genealogy of the sampled sequences.
Derivatives
genealogist
/ /dʒɛnɪˈalədʒɪst / noun ...- People are hiring genealogists to shake their family tree to try to shake out a Scot so they can say they have a Scottish connection and join our organisation.
- The basic information for genealogy research is held there and genealogists go to Richard and the other librarians who staff the main desk when there is a query about a difficulty or something strange in the research.
- And I recognize I could not do my work without the genealogists and those detail-oriented folks who preserve the essential nuts and bolts of our past.
genealogize
/ /dʒɛnɪˈalədʒʌɪz / (also genealogise) verb ...- A grand ceremony was also held here once every 10 years for the emperor to genealogize the royal blood.
- She said that a gaggle of good Catholic sisters comes in every Thursday and genealogizes like crazy all afternoon.
- It's good practice if I decide to do freelance genealogizing one day.
Origin
Middle English: via Old French and late Latin from Greek genealogia, from genea 'race, generation' + -logia (see -logy).