MARY KIRCHER RODDY
  • Home
  • Coaching and Research
  • Lectures
    • Upcoming and Past Presentations
  • Searching For Stories blog
  • Publications
  • Contact
  • Resources
  • Privacy Policy

Searching for Stories

Does (family) Size Matter? 

4/23/2016

4 Comments

 
Picture
Families come in all different shapes and sizes.  Some are small with only one child, and some have 15.  Some are mostly boys, some mostly girls and some more even mix of genders.  How do those kinds of differences impact a couple when they marry?

I’ve seen firsthand what some of these differences look like.  I’m one of six children and my father is one of eight.  Our holiday celebrations were big to-do’s with lots of relatives, and tables set up in dining rooms, kitchens and family rooms to seat all the cousins, aunts and uncles who gathered to celebrate.  How proud you were when you finally “graduated” to the grown-ups table.   But my husband had a much different experience – he was one of three boys, his father was an only child, and his mom had two sisters who lived half-way across the country.  For me, a big table with lots of people around it seems a requirement to a proper holiday celebration, and it’s taken some time for Mark to understand why I might be a little blue when it’s just us and the kids for Easter (and worse now, when it’s only the two of us as the kids grow up and establish traditions that involve their spouse or partner and what a holiday means to them!)

But it’s not just holidays.  Birth order and family size shape our personalities.  Parents like to think they make all the mistakes on the first born, but that first born also gets a lot of attention and expectations heaped upon him.  Imagine the experience of a baby boy born into a house with four or five older sisters who may dote on this new little doll and spoil him rotten – the woman who marries that little prince better be prepared for a man who expects he will continue to be treated like royalty.  And in how many families is the youngest daughter expected to put her life on hold and tend to her aging parents – my great-aunt Brownie was just such a daughter, and didn’t marry until she was 40, after her parents had passed away (and then she managed to have three babies in 31 months!)

To help me look at this phenomenon of how family size and birth order might play into peoples’ lives, I’ve created a chart.  On this chart, I’ve captured both my husband’s and my ancestors, just to see how different we are in some generations and perhaps how similar in others.   Genealogists out there might recognize it’s a bit of a different presentation than your standard generation chart because I wanted to show husbands and wives right next to each other to try to make some sense of the impact their childhood experience might play in their union.  It’s not necessarily a straight-up “genetic” chart because in those instances where one parent died and the remaining parent remarried, I tried to include the half-siblings wherever they fell into the family.  

 For the nitty-gritty of the chart, I’ve used those standard (aka sexist) colors of pink for girls and blue for boys.  I put an X for ourselves and our direct ancestors’ places in their families.  And because I recognize that the loss of a child impacts the siblings and parents in powerful ways, I used an exclamation mark “!” to designate siblings lost sometime in childhood.  With my own research, I could come up with the family size and structure from my generation up to the great-grandparent level fairly easily, but ran into some trouble beyond that.  For instance, with some of my Irish and German immigrant ancestors I don’t know much about their family of origin or their place in it.  I’ve got a lot of question marks… 

A shout-out to genealogist, J Paul Hawthorne, who started the colored chart phenomenon.  It really has captured my imagination as to how a graphical representation of data can make it come alive.   If you want to do your own chart, I’ve created a blank chart, all ready for you to fill in with names and pink and blue boxes.  You can se​e it on my website at http://www.mkrgenealogy.com/links.html  Fill in your family and let me know if you find any insight into your ancestors' couplehood!
4 Comments
J. Paul Hawthorne
4/23/2016 04:24:33 pm

Excellent idea, Mary! Very elaborate and very useful! I'm going to try it right now!

Reply
GeneGinny
4/23/2016 06:04:34 pm

And what insights has this table/chart given you?

Reply
Mary Kircher Roddy link
4/23/2016 06:41:12 pm

It made me think about my great-grandfather, Jerry. He was near the youngest of a large family from Virginia, but lived his adult life in California and married an only child. I imagine he might have missed his family and I wonder about his life with his wife, an only child. And in another branch was my great-grandmother, Mary Agnes, whose mother died when Mary Agnes was only 14, was the oldest and had to shoulder much of the childcare for her younger siblings. She herself had a large family and I think her position as the oldest made her the capable woman she was. And I look at my husbands family, particularly the more recent generations with the small families - when Mark and I were first married and took a cross country trip staying with relatives along the way, we called his mom one time from the road and her comment was "Just how many relatives does Mary have?!!!"

Reply
carolyn
4/25/2016 02:32:43 pm

I just did this,and I realized that for the most part, my males are closer to being the oldest, and the females are farther down the line in their family listing. Or they were oldest marrying oldest. Which is me also, LOL.

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    Author

    Mary Kircher Roddy is a genealogist, writer and lecturer, always looking for the story.  Her blog is a combination of the stories she has found and the tools she used to find them.

    Read more of Mary's writings at "Adventures of A Broad Abroad" and at Letters from Limerick

    Archives

    November 2020
    August 2020
    July 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    November 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016

    Categories

    All
    Achard
    Ahern
    Aldrich
    Amador County Genealogy
    Ancestry.com
    Archives
    Blair County
    Bradley Family
    Brannack
    Brannock
    Brown
    Brown Family
    California Genealogy
    Cemetery
    Census
    Citations
    City Directories
    Clark County
    Death Records
    DNA Strategies
    Education
    Enslaved People Research
    FamilySearch
    Family Stories
    Fields Family
    Freuhauf
    Genealogy Conferences
    Genealogy Education
    German Research
    Germany
    Graham Family
    Grandparents
    Hardy
    Hartmann
    Indexes
    Ireland
    Kircher
    Letters
    Lunenburg
    Map
    Mapping Tools
    Midwives
    Military
    Newspaper
    Newspapers
    New York
    Ohio
    Pennsylvania
    ProGen
    Railroad
    Records
    Research Techniques
    San Francisco
    Sonoma County Genealogy
    Spreadsheets
    Springer
    Tiburon
    Timelines
    Virginia
    Virginia Genealogy
    Vital Records
    War
    Webster
    World War II Research
    Writing

     Subscribe in a reader

    Enter your email address:

    Delivered by FeedBurner

    Picture
Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • Home
  • Coaching and Research
  • Lectures
    • Upcoming and Past Presentations
  • Searching For Stories blog
  • Publications
  • Contact
  • Resources
  • Privacy Policy