What's the difference between genealogy and family history?

None in my book. But for some, there is a distinction between skeletal and full-bodied information.

I often refer to skeletal genealogy as bare bones genealogy.

Many amateur genealogists -- which defines most of us -- are interested only in the basic data that comprise bare bones. Parents' names, birth and death dates, places of birth and death, name of spouse and marriage date, date of any divorces, when and where buried or cremated, and that's about it.

What's that? Ten or 11 pieces of vital information. Additional information puts flesh on the bones.

What additional information?

Just about anything associated with a person. The kind of stuff that fleshes out a person and breathes life into them.

Some of this is necessary to ensure that the skeletal parts identify our ancestor and not someone else. Places lived, occupation, military service, religion, education and fraternal organizations are a few facts that help identify and breathe life into our ancestors.

Our ancestors spring to life when we learn how they lived, through oral or written history.

A couple of examples:

w On a warm Tuesday, Sept. 3, 1991, as I walked away from Marvin E. Barnes' grave following graveside services in Lewiston's Normal Hill Cemetery, a Barnes cousin whom I had never met introduced himself.

As we slowly made our way to our vehicles, he related a wonderful story about my granduncle, Hazard Perry Barnes. As a young man, Perry decided to enlist in the Spanish-American War, but was afraid his parents wouldn't approve.

One day he hitched a team to a wagon and went to town to fetch a load of fence posts. There, he enlisted and departed without saying good bye. I don't know whether he made arrangements for someone to return the team and wagon to his parents' farm, or just let the old folks come to town looking for him when he didn't return.

When he returned from the war, he didn't tell his parents when he would arrive and just walked into the house one day. When he did, his mother looked up from her work and said, "You've been gone a long time for a load of fence posts."

I never knew Uncle Perry, although I may have met him a few times when I was a youngster, and his parents were long gone before I appeared on life's stage in 1938. But just this little story connects me to my maternal great-grandparents and granduncle.

w I am moved to tears writing about my father-in-law, Charles Frederick Thompson, who as a 16-year-old boy promised his father as he lay on his death bed that he would take care of the family. His father sickened and died in less than 24 hours during the 1918 influenza epidemic.

For the next 16 years, Ruth's father supported his mother and siblings. He didn't marry until the last of his five siblings graduated from high school.

This is increasingly called family history, instead of genealogy. I don't know why the term genealogy isn't large enough to fit the whole subject, but our society seems to have a compulsion to rename things.

It may have been a half-century ago that the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints changed its term from genealogy to family history. The motive was to emphasize the work could and should be much broader than skeletal data. There is great value in learning more about our ancestors. I don't care whether we call it genealogy or family history, I care passionately for it.