ABSTRACT
This conclusion provides closing thoughts on the key concepts discussed in the preceeding chapters of this book. The book has been generally well-received by genealogists and has encouraged me to continue writing about geography for the genealogical community. Genealogy research has been a longstanding tradition in Samuel Otterstrom's family partly because of his nineteenth-century Mormon pioneer ancestry. Mary Ruvane was able to observe the process of transforming historical data into GIS representations of prior neighborhoods and to study their utility for genealogical research and improving access to archive collections. Genealogy also provides a reservoir of possibilities for political geographers and cartographers, as already noted, when political boundaries change, successive nationalisms evolve, and patriotic loyalties adjust. Genealogy is now a salient socio-cultural, economic, and political force in the world today and should be considered more seriously as an area of scholarship for psychologists, political scientists, anthropologists, historians, economists, and sociologists.
