Talk:Slane Theocracy/@comment-26514268-20180407173122/@comment-45.56.46.26-20180727162051

Not sure what distinction you're drawing here.

It should mean that the government keeps official geneological records to track bloodlines of the Godkin. This kind of official family register is more or less a common practice in East Asia, it is less common in European countries, where the government was only concerned with geneology of nobility, and usually left it to the families to keep their records rather than having an official one kept by the government.

The pertinent information of record is marriages and births. Both are easier to track by having them entered in the record when they occur rather than by a census, which usually implies periodically going back after the facts to ask everyone about their marriages and births since the last census. In European countries common law marriage was fairly common and, along with any resulting children, not regarded as a matter of particular importance for the government to track. This may have been partly due to the practice of legal monogamy, meaning that the typical person in power had a vested interest in not having particularly detailed paternity records of every single child born in the administrative region they oversaw.