Writers have 2 friends they consult frequently: the dictionary and the thesaurus. (That word has always been a difficult one for me to spell, so I imagine a yet-to-be discovered dino-saur whose full name is The---Saur---Us. Or I think of an exclamation about T-Rex: "T ! He Saur Us!") The thesaurus contains great lists of synonyms, offering alternative words with like-meanings.
Last night I was re-reading the part of my genealogy book that covers a church history. I was editing the section for sentence structure and repetitive words. Since the topic is genealogy, it was no surprise that the words "family" and "families" were found in many sentences. "These families migrated from..." "When searching for families of this church...." "These families often inter-married throughout many generations." So I visited the trusty "The--Saur-Us" online <http://thesaurus.reference.com/> for alternative words.
There are words that easily substitute for "family" if writing about one's own kin. Instead of "My family...," I could use any of these words: (my) ancestors, ancestry (includes), descendants, descent, folk/folks, forebearers, genealogy, kin, kind, kindred, line, lineage, pedigree, progenitors, relations, relatives, siblings, or even my tribe if used selectively in my writing. And if I wanted a more precise word and was talking about my own family, I could describe parts of my family: (my) parents, parental (as a descriptor, ex. my parental home), children, siblings, etc, But, the choices become very limited when wanting a word that means "family," but family that is not your own.
Since the church history in my book covers many unrelated families, and groups of families, I could insert a surname and use phrases like: ..members of the Lane brood...; the Waller clan... the Shidler descendants... the Camp relations....; the Wise kin-folk... or something generic like, ....members of these households..... And if I didn't mind using outdated or odd phrases, I could use words like blood, clan, strain, or tribe.
It seems there are few words that substitute for "family," and fewer single words to use in place of "families," especially groups of unrelated persons. Oooo, another phrase I could use at least once, although it could sound strange: "These groups of partly-related (or unrelated)persons traveled together..." Naa, that doesn't really fit or read well.
No, the word that fits best the majority of times is, simply, families. Families in the singular sense (household groups that are related), or families plural (groups of families that have some common relationship; or groups of families with no blood relationship, like within churches).
It seems fitting that there are few words that can precisely be substituted for family and families. There is a reverence in referring to one's own family, and we are inclusive by using that one word. Just that one word "family" embraces all of our immediate , primary relationships (mother, father, sister/s, brother/s), and those in our extended family (aunt/s, uncle/s, cousin/s, grandparents, and more). Those two words have value attached, especially when we extend it to include those we consider to be our "family" but who are not necessarily blood relations.
In writing genealogies, we must retain that essence of "value" when describing one's own family or groups of families. Otherwise, we could easily use sentences like "This species of the Lane family rode horseback over the rolling mountains of western Maryland, arriving in southwest Pennsylvania by 1809." No, written genealogies reflect the esteem we ascribe to the meaning of "family" and "families". And, that is fitting, in a way that no thesaurus can offer anything that fits better.
(c) 2005 Judy Florian
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