The next step is to gather genealogical information. One New Tribes missionary wrote, "The people have really taken to the idea of genealogies and are especially glad when the fellows learn their names, that is their calling names. It seems that most also have another name that is seldom used and is probably their real name. Usually when someone new comes through, he will visit the house for the purpose of giving his genealogy. This always makes good language contact. The fellows have tried to get their genealogies in the various houses where ego lives. This much better as you can often see the relative sitting right there in front of you. So the fellows have genealogies which include about half of the people in their mountain community." (They studied not only the immediate longhouse but some that were as much a an hour's climb away.)

Probably the smallest social groups we will study are the families of orientation and procreation of an individual. A person's family of orientation is the one in which he was born and reared. Usually it includes his father, mother, and siblings. Family of procreation is that family a person forms through marriage, and includes the spouse and children. If we use the names we gathered in our house census and elicit the families of orientation and procreation for them we will gain a functional grasp of the basic family relationships involved in the culture.

At this point we are not attempting to piece together extensive kinship charts or discover if we have the Crow, Iroquois, or Sudanese kinship system. The kinship systems you studied here form a basis for understanding many kinship systems, but it is unlikely that you will discover ones truly identical to those. It is more common to find variations and/or combinations of them.

We need to face the fact that kinship analysis can be extremely difficult, yet vitally important. Ernest Schusky introduces his book Manual for Kinship Analysis with the statement, "Anthropologists have studied kinship more than any other single topic." In order to discover the kin-relationships of a tribe we will need first of all to begin to chart the nuclear families and the kinship terms used in them. In Yanomamo the Fierce People Napoleon Chagnon states, "Primitive social organization is kinship organization, and to understand the Yanomamo way of life I had to collect extensive genealogies."

Our goal in gathering genealogies is first of all to continue to develop our role as a learner in the society (it goes without saying that this investigation should be done in the language).

Second, we want a simple understanding of the nuclear and extended families and an understanding of the relationships within those groups. With a deeper understanding of the language and culture we will gain a clearer understanding of the entire kinship and social puzzle.

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