As Ulmer writes in Teletheory: Grammatology in the Age of Video:

"A mystorical essay is not scholarship, not the communication of a prior sense, but the discovery of a direction by means of writing." (Ulmer, 1989, p.90)

Where traditional scholarship depends on the return to the already known, hence the term 'research' (re-search), mystory;

"intervenes on the side of discovery, within the problematic of the subject of knowledge. Derrida first raised this question in the context of Husserl's study of the origin of geometry, having to do with the problem of origins, of the foundation of a science on the ground of pre-science: the present of any idea is always pre-sent (envois). "Husserl repeatedly and obstinately returns to a question which is at bottom the following: how can the subjective egological evidence of sense become objective and intersubjective? How can it give rise to an ideal and true object, with all the characteristics that we know it to have: omnitemporal validity, universal normativity, intelligibility for 'everyone,' uprootedness out of all 'here and now' factuality, and so forth? . How can subjectivity go out of itself in order to encounter or constitute the object?" (Derrida, 1978: 63). In asking how a unique, individual subject discovers, invents or otherwise gives rise to a system of knowledge, Derrida places the question of dissemination in the context of inventio and the apparatus - the conjunction of discovery and justification." (Ulmer, 1989, p.90-91)

Geneaology and family history have remained outside the traditional academy because they disrupt the focus of traditional historiography. They are less about the establishment of an a priori historical landscape and more about the invention of a past that is concurrent with the present moment. Family history is made in the present, no matter how hard it may seek to establish its historical credentials by rooting itself in the documents of the past.

In the process of 'unearthing', the family historian relies heavily on these documents as artifacts that signify, alongside Barthes assertion of the ur-doxa of the photographic image, that this-has-been. But the notion that this has been has to be has to be expressed in the 'here and now' and it is the invention of the narratives of family history that preside over this process.