Genealogy - art or science or a mixture of both? Or neither? - Member Blogs

After I thought about the relationship of genealogy as a discipline toeither art or science, I decided to look online and see what was there.To my surprise (not really) it turns out that the subject is not widelydiscussed. I did find one Blog post on the subject called "Genealogy is an Art"from the year 2000. Right out of the chute, I must say that I disagreewith this Blogger's assessment. Although genealogy, in my opinion, isnot an art, it is only partially a science. What is certain is thatgenealogy can only overcome its inherent limitations as a discipline tothe extent that its methodology becomes scientific.

One of the main challenges of genealogy as a serious pursuit originatesin the failure of many, perhaps most, of its adherents to follow anysort of rigorous methodology. Genealogy should be considered a branch ofHistory (with a capital "H"). But it is notable that there is only themost tenuous connection between the mainstream of historical researchand genealogy as a discipline. There are a mere handful of schools andonly one university that award degrees in genealogy. There are twofour-year programs, one at the Heritage Genealogy College,a privately operated school in Salt Lake City, Utah and Brigham YoungUniversity, in Provo, Utah. Other schools offer associate degrees andclass credit.

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