My name is Jakub Vachuška, and I began researching my ancestors and creating a family tree while studying at Charles University. I expanded the part of the family tree that I needed for an exam in historical demography, and today the entire family tree has over 1,300 individuals. Just under four hundred of them bear my surname. The oldest known ancestor was born in the first half of the 17th century and survived the Thirty Years' War.
From the fragments of my family tree, you can learn everything there is to know about your ancestors. Where they lived or where they came from. How many wives or husbands they had and how many children. How old they lived to be and what they died of. What craft they practiced and what first name they inherited.
I learned to tell the story of my family so that I could also tell the story of your family.
The story of a lineage is the most concise combination of what I see in it. One person is an individual. But many individuals give rise to something greater than each of them alone. It is no longer an individual, one ancestor, but a collective, an entire family. Each of us and our ancestors is part of a lineage. That is why I do not emphasize the great-grandfather, nor the ancestor, nor the ancestors. I emphasize the lineage.
One event, for example the birth of one child, is just one event. But multiple events make up a story. The birth of eight children in the 18th century, of whom only two survived to adulthood, to parents who married at 21, lived in the same house their entire lives and did not even live to be 45, is already a story. That is why I emphasize the story.
That is the reason of name story of a lineage.