Posts Tagged ‘Family’
The Roman Family
June 11, 2010 | 
Author The father in the Roman family (paterfamilias) exercised absolute and lifelong power over all other family members (patria potestas): his wife, children, and slaves. If the father’s father was alive – then he was the supreme authority in the household. Fathers were even allowed to execute their grown sons for serious offenses like treason.
Each house maintained a cult of ancestors and hearth gods and the paterfamilias was its priest. The family was thought to posses a “genius” (gens) – an inner spirit – passed down the generations. The living and the dead members of the family shared the gens and were bound by it.
Legitimate offspring belonged to the father’s family. The father retained custody if the couple (rarely) divorced exclusively at the husband’s initiative. The father had the right to disown a newborn – usually deformed boys or girls. This led to a severe shortage of women in Rome.
The father of the bride had to pay a sizable dowry to the family of the groom, thus impoverishing the other members of the family. Moreover, daughters shared equally in the estate of a father who died without a will – thus transferring assets from their family of origin to their husband’s family. No wonder females were decried as an economic liability.
At the beginning, slaves were considered to be part of the family and were well-treated. They were allowed to save money (peculium) and to purchase their freedom. Freed slaves became full-fledged Roman citizens and usually stayed on with the family as hired help or paid laborers. Only much later, in the vast plantations amassed by wealthy Romans, were slaves abused and regarded as inanimate property.
Posted in Sociology | 
Tags: Family, father, peculium, Roman, roman citizens, Rome, wealthy romans | 
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A Beginner’s Guide an Lost Relatives and Ancestors
“Collecting Dead Relatives and Sometimes a Live Cousin” and “My Family Tree is Lost in the Forest” are just some of the catchy slogans found printed on the shirts of genealogy enthusiasts. These avid researchers are looking to fill the holes in their family trees. It’s work that most have been at for decades.
My wife and I wanted to get started finding our lost relatives, but we didn’t know where to begin. She had a binder full of information that one of her relatives had put together, but other than that, we were the ones who were lost.
We started by going to the Genealogy library at Brigham Young University’s Harold B. Lee Library, but you can also do this online.
The first step to finding your lost relatives is to download all the information that has already been compiled. We did this by using the Ancestral File database that is indexed at the world’s largest genealogy library, The Family History Center in Salt Lake City, Utah. We remotely accessed the database and first found my wife’s records. We saw on her pedigree chart that some relatives had already compiled information on her mother’s line, but her father’s line was empty. After downloading my wife’s pedigree chart onto a GEDCOM file, we did some research on her father’s line. The family history consultant told us that it’s possible that there has been work done on her father’s line, but it just hasn’t been connected to my wife’s file.
By typing in her paternal grandfather’s name into the search, we were able to find much more information. The consultant told us that we needed to download his pedigree chart, take it home to our computer and merge his file with my wife’s file. That would associate all his information with my wife’s.