Genealogy and Personalism
(Published in The Second Boat)
I had an interest in Personalism for several years, before I became a family genealogist. While researching my ancestors, I began to see a whole new viewpoint on personal connections.
Personalism is the belief put into action that the Person is of prime importance: the Person is to be valued, above all, over organizations.
The goal of Personalism is to humanize the system we live in - to emphasize the personal system over the impersonal system. The impersonal system works by “the letter of the law”, the rulebook, while the personal system works by human judgment, with respect for elder wisdom, for wise persons as the embodiment of wisdom.
The personal system is built through personal connections (relationships). By building relationships, we build community and strengthen the Person by giving him others to lean on, to depend on, to love and be loved by. Personalism aims to build a network of relationships whereby no person is left out, - where every individual is cared for.
A Person is a soul. The cry of the Person is “I Am”. The existence and individuality of a Person are to be respected and valued intrinsically. The Person is not to be judged by his/her accomplishments or financial status.
Genealogists soon discover their ancestors as Persons. As soon as you record a Person’s name and vital statistics, you declare, “He Was”. Each and every name in your file represents a real Person, with a life story. As we gather the bits and pieces of that story, we begin to know a little of the Person. Whether that Person was a “success” or not in the world of man, we recognize his place on the family tree - for better or worse. In a sense, we say we “care” about that person.
When we link one name to another in genealogy, we are linking Persons, linking Souls, some living and some deceased. We are building a network. We genealogists as a whole, and some in particular, i.e., the LDS, are working to link every Person, one with another,
Many genealogists, while working on an ancestor, gain a sense of the Person as a Soul, which is immortal. We often feel they are with us, aiding us, leading us, helping us to locate their data in order to record their life. They still say to us, “I am”
We are zooming deeper and deeper into the technological age, when we must question whether our system, our organized way of living, is becoming more and more dehumanized, and we Persons are becoming more and more simply cogs in the big machine. Personalism is the Philosophy that we all need to be aware in our everyday encounters, and in all our decision making, that the Person comes first, over any organization, including businesses, governments, and religions.
Susan Winters Smith
