Village, Generated with Bing ImageCreator AI 5 October 2024 What is the " basic unit of society "? It is often said to be the family. However, even in so-called Western societies, where families are often defined as a husband, wife and their children, about half the families I find in records do not meet the monogamy  standard. Often one of the partners has died or divorced, and there are other family members living with them—parents or other relatives of one or more of the partners, former neighbors or their children, "fictive kin," such as a close neighbor or relative of an in-law or former spouse. FAN Principle The more we follow the FAN principle [1] , and research all the people in and around the family, the more strongly we find that the basic unit is the village or neighborhood . While people do occasionally move somewhere new all by themselves, that is often impelled by personal danger of some sort, such as a crime or other threat. Mostly, people moved with

FAN Research: Riches Ahead! It isn't all mysteries and adventure; by following the FANs ( F amily, A ssociates & N eighbors), fascinating stories can be unearthed. Families intertwine in the most interesting patterns. Digging in the dirt, as in archaeology, beauty sometimes emerges.  I found an image which reminds me of this family, created centuries ago by the Minoans, now in the Heraklion Archaeological Museum, Crete. Isn't it gorgeous? Courtesy of Mark Cartwright, published on 4 September 2017. The copyright holder has published this content under the following license: Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike. Who are these Hamiltons who keep showing up in my tree and my DNA matches? This has been the question I've been asking myself more often lately. So far, no Hamilton ancestors have shown up, but the Hamiltons are the largest portion of my grandfather Harvey McBee' s ancestors' FAN club for four generations. In the screenshot below, you can

  Sometimes I focus on a single person or family, and lose the larger context. A recent discussion in our Tech User Group opened my eyes to this, and shows me that our focus must remain on finding the stories of our families, and then passing along those stories so that our history lives on. SKCGS is here to help you use whatever you need to find those stories, and to help you tell them. Tree Completeness One way to begin to do this is to look at your overall tree, and one way to do that is with a fan chart. As I look at my tree, I'm a bit behind filling in some of the lines here on FamilySearch Family Tree! I need to fill in my Swedish great-grandmother's grandfather, at least. That's the big gap on the upper left. I believe I can do that soon. The gap to the upper right is in my focus family for the next few years, in Tennessee, North Carolina and Virginia, aided by DNA evidence, so these women are not forgotten.  Who Were Your People? To pull back even further, who wer