The article attempts to move beyond cursory definitions to explore the fundamental core and practice of genealogy. Some genealogical writers think that it is history or a subset of history. Others view it as a study of kinship, or relations, and identity. Though technology is increasingly used as a tool to do genealogy, it is not viewed as its essence. The article moves toward an answer to the question “what is genealogy?” through four interventions directed at these four concepts. It examines history, kinship, identity, and technology in relation to genealogy. It demonstrates key differences between history and genealogy. It discusses the use of the genealogical model in anthropology, and then relates how sociology views kinship as social. Four kinds of identity are relevant to genealogy, but none answers what genealogy is. The article argues that genealogy is a technology in the ancient Greek sense. Technē is primarily a kind of practical knowledge with characteristics congruent with genealogy’s project. Genealogy is a technē in its essence rather than history, a study of kinship, or a study of identity.

The central philosophical problem of birth concerns the fact that it is an event necessary for all events. As such, it is the nihilated a priori of itself-in short, it is lost in an abyss of consciousness. The article engages with the thoughts of Sartre, Ricoeur, Henry, Romano, Marion, and Husserl to explain some facets of abyssal birth. It argues that family genealogy may contribute to the philosophical dialogue about birth. Family genealogy is usually practiced with a methodology oriented to epistemology. At times, however, genealogical research may bring the historical ancestral past to presence as a lived experience, thus grounding birth in transgenerational intersubjectivity. To explain this more fully, the article compares this presence affect with similar affects in history, art, and psychoanalysis. The article does not make the birth-as-abyssal problem-as framed by philosophers-vanish, but it questions considering one's birth exclusively as epistemological. Presence, though closer to ontology than epistemology, is more accurately classified as phenomenological, being as event rather than event as being.

The search for Margaret Champion's mother is accomplished using two approaches. The first employs the FAN (friends, associates, neighbors) method and direct evidence. Associates in eighteenth-century America (and elsewhere and in other eras) were predominantly male because it was overwhelmingly males who participated in transactions and organizations that indicated association. A brief consideration of some of the philosophical and sociological theories of feminism, however, shows the critical role of women in connecting families together over time and binding family units united in marriage. Often male FAN associations were dependent on female connections. Thus, the second approach combines the female connection method and direct evidence. In some cases, this method not only leads to solutions to practical genealogical problems but also explains the reasons families were networked. This case study illustrates both approaches. Its research subject is Margaret Champion who lived in Pennsylvania and Ohio in the United States, and who died in Ohio in 1843. She was chosen for this case study because she served a pivotal role in her extended family. The genealogical research goal is to learn who her mother was. The article opens with establishing who her father was. Beginning the search in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, it first uses a combination of clues gathered from direct evidence and the FAN method. After achieving the end goal of identifying her mother, the article next illustrates how the problem is also solved using the female connection method without the FAN method. Of course, these two methods may be used together to bolster the proof argument. Margaret Champion When Christian Zimmerman * wrote his undated will in Huntingdon County, Pennsylvania, he named Margaret Champion as one of his children. 2 It was written between 1803 (it mentions daughter Sarah who was born in about 1803) 3 and 7 November 1805 (when the will was proved). 4 The will did not specify who Margaret's husband was, but referred to Zimmerman's plantation "where John Champion now lives," strongly suggesting

Attempts to explain the meaning of apechei in Mark 14:41 have failed to achieve a consensus among scholars perhaps because they dwell on events and characters in the story. In contrast, this article seeks to understand the use of apechei in the text of the author. The translation with the strongest evidence relates to a financial transaction that has been completed. The article argues that apechei refers to the final prayer of Jesus and sleep of the disciples and asks what it is about that pair that makes them a final payment. It examines the three prayer–sleep iterations in Gethsemane and shows that they comprise a comic scene. Apechei thus refers to the sufficiency of the three iterations to attest to comedy. The article then demonstrates that the betrayal, ear-cutting, and naked young man narratives are all comedy. Apechei is thus an important hermeneutic clue to comedy in Gethsemane.

Through a critical reading of Hölderlin’s poetry and Heidegger’s thinking, this essay explores how thunder awakens us to the elemental, opens us to the elements through their boundaries or cracks, and brings the hum and clamor of things, their elemental voices, to our presence.