You Can Go Home Again: Reconnecting with Your Family

Beginning with the premise that understanding personal family history is essential for making informed choices, McGoldrick, director of the Family Institute of New Jersey, offers an innovative method of combining genealogical research with self-awareness. An exploration of family history, according to the author, is done by plotting a ``genogram,'' which is a family tree spanning three generations. Genograms of famous families provided here--Roosevelts, Brontes, Freuds and others--illustrate McGoldrick's thesis that all families have repetitive patterns such as illegitimacy or suicide that have been hidden from descendants. Understanding one's family patterns makes it possible, McGoldrick claims, to connect with one's ancestors and to recreate better family relationships for oneself. Included are many suggestions for obtaining and interpreting the information necessary to plot your own genogram. Illustration. (Mar.)