The Invisible History of the Human Race (42 page)

One ex-ward
:
The Care Leavers Australia Network has a newsletter in which the classifieds read like ads for former selves: “Michael would like to get in touch with anyone that remembers him in Renwick in the 1950s”; “If anyone can remember my nickname Debbie Wobble Head from the Ballarat Children’s Home, it would be nice to have some contact.”

access to this fundamental information
:
It may be that people born in the Federal Witness Protection Program are also denied access to their original birth certificate. It’s unclear to how many individuals this has applied.

“Ivy, my little mate”
:
Getchell did see her father again before he died, but he didn’t tell her that he had tried to find her, so she never knew. Perhaps he thought she received his letter but did not want to respond.

family connection to a dissident
:
My thanks to Katy Oh and Andrei Lankov for this information.

fallout from the recent dictator
:
Biographical information about Baiying Borjigin comes from my interview with him and from B. Borjigin,
Searching for My Source: A Descendant of Genghis Khan
(Canberra, Australia: Australian Chinese Culture Exchange and Promotion Association, 2010).

“The meals and bodies”
:
B. Borjigin,
Searching for My Source: A Descendant of Genghis Khan
(Canberra, Australia: Australian Chinese Culture Exchange and Promotion Association, 2010), 18.

“If you can restore this list”
:
B. Borjigin,
Searching for My Source: A Descendant of Genghis Khan
(Canberra, Australia: Australian Chinese Culture Exchange and Promotion Association, 2010), 24.

find my family’s origins
:
This historian was Helen Harris.

They were often hungry too
:
This was because other passengers stole their food, not because there wasn’t enough in the first place.

“Never mind, dear”
:
Unless otherwise cited, quotes from Alison Alexander in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

she know that was the case?
:
Much of the information about Tasmanian convicts in this chapter comes from my interviews with Alexander and from her book, A. Alexander,
Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society
(
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010). In many cases I came across the most interesting stories, statistics, and quotes through her first.

that was wicked in another
:
J. Braithwaite, “Crime in a Convict Republic,”
Modern Law Review
64, no. 1 (2001): 11–50.

shipload of convicts in 1812
:
The English sent convicts to the United States starting in the seventeenth century. After 1829 more than two and a quarter million convicts were transported from one country in the world to another, according to Braithwaite.

wives and children sent from England
:
Because the system assigned convicts to households, some were even assigned to carry out their sentences under their wives.

“a new and splendid country”
:
J. Braithwaite, “Crime in a Convict Republic,”
Modern Law Review
64, no. 1 (2001): 20-21.

“sink of wickedness,”
 . . . “den of thieves”:
A. Alexander,
Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society
(Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 188.

a society of dangerous people
:
The notion that convicts were a blight was not confined to England. Indeed, the Australian penal colony was established because the United States refused to take any more of Britain’s convicts. It is interesting, notes Alexander, that modern Americans have a degree of amnesia, or at least a distinct lack of interest, in their own convict past. For all of Benjamin Franklin’s egalitarian bonhomie, he was not enthusiastic about lawbreakers. He set the tone when writing of British transportation: “Emptying their jails into our settlements is an insult and contempt, the cruelest that even one people offered to another.” (A. Alexander,
Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society
[
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010], 186.) Later, and more succinctly, he declared: “Send them back rattlesnakes!” (J. Braithwaite, “Crime in a Convict Republic,”
Modern Law Review
64, no. 1 [2001]: 7.)

titillated by reports of bestiality and cannibalism
:
Actually, there was one rather unpleasant people-eating incident. As Alexander tells it, in 1822 about half a dozen men ran away from a penal settlement and ended up starving in the bush until one of their number, the Irishman Alexander Pearce, killed and ate the others one by one. Pearce was rearrested and sent back to the settlement, and yet he escaped once more with a new companion, young Thomas Cox. Why did Cox run with Pearce, the alleged cannibal? We’ll never know. Pearce ate him too. Pearce was caught again and finally hung in 1824.

“They misquoted Latin”
:
A. Alexander,
Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society (
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 204.

“They melt from the earth”
:
A. Alexander,
Tasmania’s Convicts: How Felons Built a Free Society (
Crows Nest: Allen & Unwin, 2010), 217.

it was the subject of relatively little research
:
J. Crowley, W. J. Smyth, and M. Murphy.
Atlas of the Great Irish Famine
(New York: New York University Press, 2012), viii.

hardly anyone spoke of it
:
The pattern is reminiscent of François Weil, a Frenchman, being the first to write a book about the history of American genealogy. Overall, Irish culture left the stories of the famine inside the box of folklore and actively downplayed its significance.

Chapter 6: Information

analog documents they held
:
A. Shoumatoff,
The Mountain of Names: A History of the Human Family
(New York: Kodansha International, 1995), pp. xxi and 318.

“The core concept”
:
Quotes from Jay Verkler in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

he associates with personal strength
:
M. P. Duke, A. Lazarus, and R. Fivush, “Knowledge of Family History as a Clinically Useful Index of Psychological Well-being and Prognosis: A Brief Report,”
Psychotherapy: Theory, Research, Practice, Training
45, no. 2 (2008): 268; M. P. Duke, “The Stories That Bind Us: What Are the Twenty Questions?” Huffington Post, March 23, 2013, available at
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/marshall-p-duke/the-stories
-that-bind-us-_b_2918975.html.

they were impossible to read
:
G. Palsson, “The Life of Family Trees and the Book of Icelanders,”
Medical Anthropology
21, no. 3–4, (2002): 337–67.

“If
well housed
, the tiles would last ten thousand years”
:
Quotes from Gavan McCarthy in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

“That’s the classic genealogist”
:
Quotes from Dan Jones in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

94 percent of all our stored information
:
S. Wu, “How Much Information is There in the World?” Phys.org, February 10, 2011, available at http://phys
.org/news/2011-02-world-scientists-total-technological-capacity.html#jCp, and M. Hilbert, “The World’s Technological Capacity to Store, Communicate, and Compute Information,”
Science
332, no. 6025, 60-65.

“When you have a hundred-percent count data”
:
Quotes from Kevin Schurer in this chapter are from my interview with him.

demographics, longevity, and fertility
:
H. Ledford, “Genome Hacker Uncovers Largest-Ever Family Tree,”
Nature
, October 28, 2013, available at http://www.nature.com/news/genome-hacker-uncovers-largest-ever-family
-tree-1.14037. The tree was built by Yaniv Erlich, whose light map project is also described.

charges for online access
:
In some special cases it is free.

“a puzzle the size of a football stadium”
:
G. Pálsson,
Anthropology and the New Genetics
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 71.

“Now a company in Iceland”
:
G. Pálsson,
Anthropology and the New Genetics
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 138.

“Accidentally sleeping with a relative”
:
T. Sykes, “Iceland’s Incest-Prevention App Gets People to Bump Their Phones Before Bumping in Bed,”
Daily Beast
, April 23, 2014, available at http://www.thedailybeast.com/
articles/2013/04/23/iceland-s-incest-prevention-app-gets-people-to-bump
-their-phones-before-bumping-in-bed.html.

eighty-eight thousand marriages
:
H. Gauvin, et al., “Genome-wide Patterns of Identity-by-Descent Sharing in the French Canadian Founder Population,”
European Journal of Human Genetics
22 (2014): 814–21.

the population boom in all of Quebec was “spectacular”
:
Unless otherwise cited, quotes from Labuda in this chapter are from my interview with him.

“the exceptional people”
:
Quotes from Janet McCalman in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

“My great-grandfather”
:
Quotes from Garry McLoughlin in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

“Some of them weren’t nice”
:
Quotes from Leanne Goss are from my interview with her.

“I hardly read novels anymore”
:
Quotes from David Noakes are from my interview with him.

Chapter 7: Ideas and Feelings

With no time to scream
:
My information about Equiano’s life and the plight of Africans during the slave trade came from many sources, including the writings of Nathan Nunn and Leonard Wantchekon, as well as Olaudah Equiano’s book: O. Equiano,
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (Written by Himself)
(Project Gutenberg EBook, 2005).

“red water ordeal”
:
W. Hawthorne, “The Production of Slaves Where There Was No State,”
Slavery and Abolition
20, no. 2 (1999): 97-124, via N. Nunn, “The Long-term Effects of Africa’s Slave Trades,”
The Quarterly Journal of Economics
123, no. 1 (2008): 139–176.

sell them to slavers
:
C. Piot, “Of Slaves and the Gift: Kabre Sale of Kin During the Era of the Slave Trade,”
Journal of African History
37, no. 1 (1996): 31–49.

more than thirty million Africans
:
According to the
Encyclopedia Britannica’s Guide to Black History
, “Approximately 18 million Africans were delivered into the Islamic trans-Saharan and Indian Ocean slave trades between 650 and 1905.” Available at http://www.britannica.com/blackhistory/article
-24156 (accessed June 1, 2014). In addition, Voyages: The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database stated that “12.5 million embarked for the New World between 1501-1866.” Available at http://www.slavevoyages.org (accessed June 1, 2014).

“The slaves all night”
:
J. Iliffe,
Africans: The History of a Continent
, vol. 85 (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

“When I get to heaven”
:
Biographical information about Wantchekon came from my interview with him and from L. Wantchekon, “Dreaming Against the Grain” (unpublished).

exposed to the slave trade
:
N. Nunn and L. Wantchekon, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,”
American Economic Review
101, no. 7 (2011): 3221–52.

trust was truly worthy
:
They ran many additional analyses in order to rule out other possible causes of distrust, such as colonialism. As with the connection between slavery and poverty, they found that colonialism mattered but by itself could not have caused the mistrust.

public meetings in Benin
:
Of course, not all differences in trust or economic issues between countries can be entirely attributed to the slave trade. In Benin, for example, Wantchekon also found that trust was undermined when people joined religious sects that fostered a culture of fear.

studies of the transmission of ideas
:
N. Voigtländer and H.-J. Voth, “Persecution Perpetuated: The Medieval Origins of Anti-Semitic Violence in Nazi Germany,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
127, no, 3 (2012): 1339–92.

decided to test them
:
A. Alesina, P. Giuliano, and N. Nunn, “On the Origins of Gender Roles: Women and the Plough,”
Quarterly Journal of Economics
128, no. 2 (2013): 469–530.

like religion and language
:
T. Talhelm, et al., “Large-Scale Psychological Differences Within China Explained by Rice vs. Wheat Agriculture,”
Science
344 (2012): 603–8.

how many children they had
:
R. Fernandez and A. Fogli, “Culture: An Empirical Investigation of Beliefs, Work, and Fertility” (working paper no. 11268, National Bureau of Economic Research, April 2005).