Our Tribes had territory. But we have the Internet. We can find our bloodlines, or our mutual deeply felt common concerns, and unite into Tribes, adopting decent strangers into them, building our numbers and our power, our possibilities, our future. We do this consciously, as consciously as we would when we join a trade union in the workplace. And like a union it enhances our security. Only this time it doesn’t enhance the security of our “job” (labour without capital, dependent on bosses). Instead it enhances the security of our own family, within a Gens, within a Fraternity, within a Tribe, within a Nation, within a Confederacy.
And so to the more detailed mechanics of how we might go about this – how we get from here to there. Someone might write a dedicated app for this process one day, but in the meantime, various social media apps can function perfectly well.
Gens is a slightly clumsy word, a Latin neutral noun. Let’s get modern and abbreviate to Gen. The plural can be Gens.
In looking for our Gen, we are looking to find the seven women who lead us back to our great, great, great, great, great grandmother, who we shall call the 6GM – that’s 5 greats and one grand.
Sounds like a lot of work for a lot of people. Not if we approach it in the following way.
The work can be reduced if we initially trace back to our 2GM, our great, grandmother. Then we find each other with the name of the 2GM on social media.
The group is named according to the following protocol. The first part is the word “Gen” to indicate that this group is part of this endeavour – it is a social media “Gen group”.
The second part of the name is where the identified person is on the ancestral scale. She is my great, grandmother, my 2GM.
The third part is my 2GM’s original name, i.e. her “maiden” name, not her married name. And the fourth part is her initials. The fifth part is her date of birth, formatted as DD-MM-YYYY. And finally the sixth part is her place of birth, including the district if in a large city.
So in this example, the group name is “Gen2GMEvansGL23101912York”. Ms Gladys Maud Evans was born in York on 23rd October 1912 and is my great, grandmother.
First I will search to see if such a group exists, If not, I will start it and others will find it and join it when they realise that Gladys was also their Great Grandmother, their 2GM. Soon, there will be 50 people in this 2GM group. We just found dozens of new relatives. We have barely begun.
To find your own place in this structure of power you will need to gather your own personal information. Go to your oldest surviving female relative, Mum or Gran, ask them for several pieces of information.
Full name, original surname, date and place of birth, full name of partner.
Try to get as much of the same information as listed above about their deceased mums and dads. And if their mums and dads had siblings then the same information about them too. It’s a lot less work to get all this information about your relatives while they’re alive than it is to retrieve it from public records after they have died.
If there is not precise information then just get what you can – where they lived and/or died can be useful in tracking down a birth certificate.
All this information will give you and all your descendants your place in the future. It might take a short while to do it, but you only have to do it once, and it lasts forever.
Even if you decide that this is not for you, gather the information while your elderly relatives are still alive. Your children might greatly appreciate it.
It is helpful to include all research in the Gen group posts, namely in the case of our example above, Gladys’ sisters and daughters. Include their names in keyphrases, metadata etc so that someone who has only got as far as finding their Grandmother’s maiden name can do a search and find their Grandmother is in your group. They then know who their Great Grandmother is without doing any further digging. If it’s working well, one person finds the Great Grandmother and the other 249 who know their Grandmother’s maiden name don’t need to do any further work. One person did it for 250.
Each new Gen that forms should offer proof of its credentials – a reference to the record and its number, and a screenshot of the register. There will always be people who will do whatever they can to deny the equal sharing of power.
This group, our new Gen, can then collaborate, to find the name of Gladys’ mum, our 3GM. Where before we have everyone looking for one name, now we have just a few of us looking for Gladys’ mum. And when we find her, we have found the new Gen name and the name of the new group.
“Gen3GMJonesKP16091880RedcliffeBristol”.
Ms Katherine Jones was born on 16th September 1880 in Redcliffe, Bristol. Did we get there first? Or do we look on social media and hey presto, some of her other descendants got there first, and so we join many more of our new-found relatives in their group. Now we are 500 in our group. Let’s associate and celebrate – we have found each other. And we are nearly at the point where we can save each other. It’s a strange feeling having this many relatives. Probably skip the Christmas presents.
Before we continue, a note on adoption. Remember that it was always the case, that the Gen is free to adopt. We never did and never should discriminate against lone persons. For example, recent immigrants may have very few connections in the resident country, but of course just as many as anyone else that are resident abroad. The international connection also adds strength to the whole structure. Gen membership in the 21st Century now knows no national boundaries.
If in the case where a person finds very few others in the resident country then the person can take the Gen name of their closest connection in their country of residence – for example, their partner or best friend, while also maintaining their actual Gen name as well so that they can pass both to their children.
For those who struggle to find their ancestors, there is also the possibility of DNA testing. Of the various types, mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) testing enables anyone to trace their matrilineal line. If it matches the mtDNA test of people within a particular gen then you share a female ancestor. Without further work, you have found your Gen.
Back to the action and this is when it gets really exciting. We suddenly find the name of the 4GM and it is the same 4GM name as many, many other Gen groups. Whoever finds the 4GM name first forms the group and finds that hundreds and hundreds of other people are joining. We coalesce into our 4GM group. We have found our name, and we are building our power.
“Gen4GMCaldwellJM11021858ToxtethLiverpool”
Now we pass the 1,000 barrier. Something is happening here.
The 2GM and 3GM groups are nevertheless retained for smaller, more intimate consultations that can be fed to the 4GM group. On the way to building our power, we have not only developed a huge number of relatives, we have also developed a political structure.
The 4GM, our venerable Matriarch, will have been born sometime around 1840-50. The General Register Office’s public index of every birth recorded in England and Wales goes back to 1837. And the first census goes back further still, to 1801. Some people have traced their families back much further than this. But we can achieve sufficiently large groups by going back to 1801.
The population of the UK in 1801 at the time of the first census was only 7-8 million. By the 1830s, it was still only 12 million, but expanding rapidly – Britain had an empire to manage and needed the manpower. From 1801 through to 1911 there was an average 14.3% expansion in the population every 10 years. This means that our 6GM (c.1810) all the way down to our 3GM (c. 1870) had lots of children. Our Gens will be large.
We arrive back in 1801 to discover the name of our 6GM.
“Gen6GMHarrisDP29111810Winchester,”
We have finally arrived at the name of the Gen – her maiden name was Harris. Hats off to Diana Harris, she is our Grand Dame, our Matriarch and she has brought us together. Gen Harris now numbers 3,000 relatives.
I estimate that we can reach this point in about a year.
Now remember that the 6GM would probably have had a few sisters. If she had two sisters, then all their descendants through the female line are in our Gen too, and our number suddenly triples. We now number in the thousands, possibly between five and ten thousand members.
Look at any physical tree in nature. From one trunk, splitting into two boughs and then into 8 branches, 64 stems, 2,000 twigs, 5000 twiglets and finally 10,000 leaves. The clue was always there, standing completely still, all around every one of us. Our true structure, the version that we used for eons, echoes a tree. A nuclear family echoes one twiglet on the tree, divorced from its past and thus from its massive living present. But we are connected to the rest of that tree, and we always have been.
This is a Gen Tree. Curiously, it is the Gentry from whom we will reclaim our share of power. An old fashioned term maybe, but they still own 30% of the land in the UK.
Then we arrive at the Phratry, the Fraternity. Let’s call it the Phrat. The 6GM was very likely to have had a brother. The wife of that brother will be the Matriarch of a separate Gen with a different name, but the close relation by blood is there – one gen derives from the sister, and one from her brother. And so this other Gen and ours form part of the same fraternity. Now our motherhoods have formed a brotherhood. Similarly, the brother’s wife would have had sisters. The 6GM generation defines the Phratries and their relation to each other. If the 6GM Gen does not yield siblings then the 5GM Gen will. Phrats will form at the 6GM level, or if not there, then the 5GM level, and so on.
We form around 4 Phratries or the number of Phrats that brings us to roughly the 50,000 mark, And these 4 or so Phrats with the most intimate connection at the 6GM level, form a Tribe of around 50,000 people. It fills a football stadium. Except we are no longer strangers. We are all related and we are together. We all want to belong to something and now we do. Now feel your power. Now we are bigger than an International Corporation.
And yet even beyond this, our connections – and therefore our power – still grows. Both my parents may have brothers. Their children do not share my Gen name, but they do share my family name. They are in a different Gen and a different Fraternity – maybe even a different Tribe – but we are very closely related. And so we can all see that even separate Fraternities and Tribes have no interest in competing or fundamentally disagreeing. So many, many common links guarantee co-operation. It is not only undesirable for Fraternities and Tribes to fracture, the number of mutual bonds make it almost impossible. Kinship fosters a different relationship to those around you. The different culture has altered our very nature.
Now we are together. And so now is the time to sit down, initially in 2GM groups and decide what a just world should contain, and what it should not. Now we have the numbers and the political structure to claim it. We no longer need to make representations to people who have no interest in helping us. They were never accountable, they just made every effort to appear accountable. They humiliated the language and twisted it. Every word was appropriated and used in their service. Such fine words, such absence of help. Such a con. We never consented to the way in which we were governed. We were marched here.
We feed our proposals up to the 6GM group and we use appropriate technology to place our vote, to show our hands. The Fraternities gather the votes and there we have our Manifesto of Proposals. The fraternities register the Progressive Party with the Electoral Commission.
We may be mindful of the need to avoid career politicians within our own ranks, although the political structure inhibits corruption as already explained. Nevertheless, I would recommend sortition – we have little to lose by choosing our Constituency candidates randomly out of a hat since their main task is quite simple, to put our collective view forward. It’s not rocket science and we have no use for megalomaniacs, or rockets.
This stage marks the beginning of the end for traditional Political Parties whose Membership numbers will pale in comparison. Don’t mourn their passing. The Mass Media will do their best to make sure that they don’t go quietly.
The following national election becomes very, very interesting. Personally, I doubt that we would even need to campaign terribly much. But I would remind everyone in the strongest possible terms that once we achieve power, that we remember at all times that we need to be mindful to keep foreign attacks on sovereignty at arm’s length using all the tools previously outlined.