Starting a family tree when the records are oral
· 7 min read
Genealogy guides written for Europe and North America assume a paper trail: censuses every ten years, parish registers going back centuries, civil registration. For most African families that trail is thin, recent, or absent. It does not follow that the history is lost. It follows that it lives somewhere else.
Start with the oldest person, not the oldest record
The ordinary advice is to begin with yourself and work backwards. That is sound, but it understates the urgency. The binding constraint on oral genealogy is how long the eldest generation is still here to be asked. Records will wait. Memory will not.
Interview the oldest relatives first, before the tidy-minded work of filling in known branches. Record audio with permission. A transcript loses the hesitations, corrections and asides, and those are frequently where the real information sits.
Ask questions that can be checked
Open questions produce warm, unusable answers. Specific ones produce facts you can later confirm or refute:
- Who was present at the funeral, and how was each person related to the deceased?
- Which town did the family come from before this one, and who made the move?
- What was her abusua, and what was her mother's?
- Which day of the week was he born, or what was his day name?
- Who inherited the land or the house, and who contested it?
- Which church, and were the children baptised there?
Inheritance disputes are especially productive. Nothing preserves the precise degree of a relationship like an argument about who was entitled to what.
Written sources that do exist
The assumption that nothing was written down is usually wrong. What is true is that the writing is not in a national archive:
- Funeral and memorial brochures. In Ghana especially these are extraordinary genealogical documents, routinely listing parents, siblings, children, in-laws and surviving relatives by name and relationship.
- Church registers. Baptism, marriage and burial books kept by mission churches often pre-date civil registration by decades.
- School admission records, which frequently name a parent or guardian and a home town.
- Family Bibles, letters and the backs of photographs.
- Land and stool documents, which record lineage precisely because entitlement depends on it.
- Colonial-era administrative files, court records and gazettes.
Record uncertainty as data
The most common way an oral genealogy goes wrong is not error but false confidence. A remembered approximation gets entered as a date, and three years later nobody can tell which dates were known and which were guessed.
- Attach the informant and the date of the conversation to every claim.
- Keep approximations visibly approximate, rather than rounding them into apparent precision.
- Where two relatives disagree, record both accounts. A contradiction is information; a silently chosen winner is not.
- Distinguish what someone witnessed from what they were told.
Keep it portable
Whatever you use to hold the tree, make sure you can get the data out again in GEDCOM, the long-standing interchange format for genealogical data. Family history outlives software. A tree you cannot export is a tree you will eventually retype.