These are therefore the facts of his life on which attention should be
focused.
(d) More pictorial data should be added. Photographs of the members of
the family, at all ages, should be carefully preserved. Measurements
equally deserve attention. The door jamb is not a satisfactory place for
recording the heights of children, particularly in this day when
removals are so frequent. Complete anthropometric measurements, such as
every member of the Young Men's Christian Association, most college
students, and many other people are obliged to undergo once or
periodically, should be placed on file.
(e) Pedigrees should be traced upward from a living individual, rather
than downward from some hero long since dead. Of course, the ideal
method would be to combine these two, or to keep duplicate pedigrees,
one a table of ascendants and the other of descendants, in the same
stock.
Genealogical data of the needed kind, however, can not be reduced to a
mere table or a family tree. The ideal genealogy starts with a whole
fraternity--the individual who is making it and all his brothers and
sisters. It describes fully the fraternity to which the father belongs,
giving an account of each member, of the husband or wife of that member
(if married) and their children, who are of course the first cousins of
the maker of the genealogical study.
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