Using supporting evidence that runs from the Solomon Islands and classical China to ancient Ireland, Akenson argues that there are four basic genealogical forms. Highly significant on its own, this insight also provides the information needed to assess the Latter-day Saints' efforts to provide a single narrative of how humanity keeps track of itself. Appendices cover topics of vital interest to historians, genealogists, and ethnographers, such as the use and limits of genetic data in genealogy, the reality of false-paternity as a widespread phenomenon in genealogical lines, and the vexing issues of incest and cousin-marriage. A unique study of a neglected topic, Some Family illuminates the stories that cultures tell themselves through their family trees.

Donald Harman Akenson, Professor of History at Queen's University, Kingston, Ontario, is one of the -world's leading authorities on Irish history. He received his bachelor's degree from Yale and his Ph.D from Harvard. The author of twenty books, including five novels, he is a Fellow of the Royal Society (Canada) and of the Royal Historical Society (U.K.). He has held both a Guggenheim Fellowship and a writing fellowship at Villa Serbelloni, Bellagio, Como. In 1993 he received the prestigious Grawmeyer Award for Ideas Improving World Order, for his book God's People: Covenant and Land in South Africa, Israel and Ulster (1992). In 1996 he was named Molson Prize Laureate; this is Canada's highest cultural award.

Donald Harman Akenson's profile page