Most of the women on my matrilineal side share the hobby of doing extensive research in family history. Like tracing the family tree back to the 1500s level. It’s kinda cool being able to have a cohesive story of where my family has been and what they’ve done or been through. It still seems kinda….feudal adjacent in a sense.
Idk my lefty self-crit sense is tingling. What’s the line on this? Obviously there is a great deal of white privilege in even being able to, but often enough privilege seems to be something everyone should have rather than nobody having it. Thoughts?
tbf idk how much white privilege pulls into it. its more of a 'you werent descended a black slave' privilege. almost everywhere had extensive genealogy records from 1500 onwards. china was even better at it.
personally i dug really far into our lineage to try to find our oldest female ancestor because at one point surnames were based on the mother only but there was a shift in feudalism towards male names. idea was to go back to passing along the name from the women's line but alas i was just a couple generations off from being able to do it. ran out of records by around 1100
honestly its so dumb that last names are passed by men. like a woman can go cheat but youll always know she got pregnant and had the kid so it makes sense for the woman to pass the name on. whereas a guy can go cheat and youll have tons of mystery kids
also, gotta say, its a HUGE pain in the ass to dig through history because of this. if everyone passed on the woman's name it would make the whole process so easy, because sometimes you would have a bastard show up in your line and then you gotta really dig to see where the fuck they came from and from who. its a bit easier if you only care about the women because they are the constant, however it is very difficult to figure out who a woman with a bastard's parents are because it usually isnt listed because they see the woman as expendable at this point
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im aware that its a power play but it doesnt make it any less stupid
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thats more of a 23 and me thing, you can find records via contacting the governments of various countries. czechia for instance has a national archive that is pretty easily accessible and has a fuckton of records dating back centuries. like a lot of it is in german and latin because we got colonized, and they even included records from gravestones in the archives too
23andme isn't geneology, it's just a (slightly bogus) DNA test
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Passing down the father's name is exactly why patriarchal society has out so much effort into controlling women's lives.
There's a not insignificant number of guys out there who want a son primarily to pass on their last name...