ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author focuses on different cultural geographies of genealogical relatedness, exploring how the plural meanings of kinship and diverse place-based identities intersect and are mutually shaped. Yet the translation of lives into family trees, and family stories into printed histories, is also a matter of complex forms of genealogical relatedness in which the significance of biological connection is simultaneously central, challenged and displaced. As genealogy mediates and is mediated by existing family relationships it is also a practice through which new forms of relatedness are forged, sometimes with very distant relations or with people of no blood relation but bonded through a shared interest in genealogy. Using the idiom of kinship and the family to describe relationships to people who share an interest in ancestry but are not related in the conventional sense suggests that new forms of relatedness are realized through the practice of genealogy.
