In the simple sense, your genealogy is your tree of ancestors, a collection of individuals that’s specific only to you (and your siblings). Once you know your ancestors (as far as can be determined) you’re done. You know your roots. But your family is an intersection between two families – your mother’s family, with their set of traditions, and your father’s. That’s where they coincide – chances are, if it wasn’t for you, there’d be little reason for your maternal uncles and your paternal uncles to interact. They’re only there because it’s your birthday. And what about your uncles and aunts? They aren’t part of your tree, not if you organise it narrowly.

What you end up with is a series of families who have nothing to do with one-another, who are only linked at a series of nodes. Eventually you realise that you don’t have a maternal and paternal side of your family, you have an infinite set of splits (or joins, depending how you look at it).

Or maybe that isn’t always so. Eventually most trees, if you follow them far enough, probably go back to villages that may (by and large) have existed, with the same set of people, for hundred or even thousands of years. When you hit a little village like that, you no longer think in terms of names – they’re all related to you. The whole village. Every last one of them. Through hundreds of interweaving trees.

Probably.

So when you’re telling the story of where you came from, it isn’t the story of one family. It’s the story of many lines, from many places. And it gets all the more convoluted when you stretch your definition of family away from your immediate ancestors to collateral lines. And sometimes, to people who are completely unrelated to you by blood, but with whom you share a sense of family.