Today is Genealogy Day.

Where do your ancestors come from? Where do you fit on your family tree? Are you related to some famous person in history? Maybe you haven’t given much thought to questions like this, but thousands of people spend countless hours trying to discover the answers to the secrets hidden in their personal family trees.

Genealogy, the record of members of a family, is the second most popular hobby in American today—right after gardening. Genealogy is fun and educational, and everyone can join in, no matter how old. It’s like a mystery—you never know who you might find belonging to your family.

Genealogies were important in biblical times. In numerous places in the Bible, you will come across long lists of names tracing biblical family trees. (For example, see Genesis 4, 5, 1 Chronicles 5, 6, Ezra 10.) It’s often tempting to skip over these passages as just a long list of dead people, but genealogies were critical to the Jewish people. Why? For one thing, family trees were helpful in tracing priestly or royal descent. The genealogies also showed how God was at work through families in the Jewish nation. (Remember the promise of a great nation had been given to a family—Abraham’s—and passed down from there.) The New Testament has two genealogies that trace Jesus’ family tree, showing that Jesus was related to all Jews (Matthew 1:1–17) and that Jesus was related to all humankind (Luke 3:23–38). Both Matthew’s and Luke’s genealogies establish without a doubt that Jesus is the Messiah and the Savior of the world.

Go ahead and read one of the two New Testament genealogies. If you are a follower of Jesus, then guess what? You belong to Jesus’ family tree as well!

A record of the genealogy of Jesus Christ the son of David, the son of Abraham (Matthew 1:1, New International Version).

To Do

If your family hasn’t done so, take some time to make a family tree as far back as you can go.

Also on this day . . .

1781—The planet Uranus was discovered. In 1930, the planet Pluto was discovered.

1887—Chester Greenwood of Maine patented earmuffs.

1951—The comic strip “Dennis the Menace” appeared for the first time in newspapers across the country.

From Betsy Schmitt and Dave Veerman, 365 Trivia Twist Devotions: An Almanac of Fun Facts and Spiritual Truth for Every Day of the Year (Cincinnati: Standard, 2005). Scripture quotations are from the New Living Translation unless otherwise noted.