The Invisible History of the Human Race (5 page)

Simply getting older is an incentive as well. “People get married and have children and careers, and then they retire and they have the sad remorse that they don’t have their parents around anymore, so they seek for their past,” David Lambert from the New England Historic Genealogical Society told me. Aging is, of course, inevitable, and yet in Western culture people are embarrassed by it. In 2012
the novelist Will Self told the
Guardian
that some of the characters in his novel
Umbrella
were inspired by family members in his grandfather’s generation. “In a kind of tedious middle-aged way I was doing a bit of family history,” he said.

Yet it makes an entirely practical sense that the older you get, the more you begin to perceive the boundaries of your envelope. By the time you reach middle age, you’ve passed through a few personal epochs, and there is texture in your life history. Chances are the number of dead people in your life has increased too. The consciousness of what is to be lost grows, as does the consciousness of what has been.

While there may be comfort in finding one’s place in a big family tree of somewhat similar people, there is disorientation too. I found it dizzying to try to hold all my ancestors in my head, and it wasn’t the sheer number of them that made me uncomfortable so much as the realization that all those people once existed, and they undoubtedly all thought that history ended with them too.

My confusion may be explained in part by the psychology of Western culture.
A famous study compared the thinking of people from Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic nations (dubbed WEIRD) to people from different cultures. The Westerners, they found, were much more individualistic and perceived themselves to be autonomous and self-contained. They were less motivated to conform and more inclined to feel that they drove their destiny. By contrast, people in non-WEIRD societies were more naturally inclined to see their identity as inextricably connected to their network of family and community. They were enmeshed in roles and relationships and were more oriented to cooperation and the desire to “fit in” rather than “stand out.”

Some people may be offended by the idea that they are not entirely in charge of their own destiny, but many—at least by the time they are forty—come to suspect that they are not. If they are older yet and trying to figure out what it means to have a legacy—if their children have children—then simply by virtue of having survived for long enough, they’ve begun to have a lot more in common with their long-dead ancestors than they used to.

The problem with letting go of our personal presentism is that it not only undermines the sense that
now
is more important than
then
but it also calls into question a whole cluster of connected and comforting assumptions. For example, we experience ourselves as a whole, yet the smallest glance backward tells us we are put together by fractions. While the complicated process of development makes most of the seams of our original self invisible to the naked eye, we were once made up of halves. When our parents made us, they each contributed a sample of their DNA, donating twenty-three chromosomes each; if we take the perspective of our parents’ parents, we were made up of four parts, as each of them donated about 25 percent of their DNA to us.

We think of our culture as a whole too. Everything in our day-to-day lives is covered by the same patina of familiarity, but in reality we live in a patchwork of ancient and modern technologies. The same is true of language. Think about a term like “Trojan horse.” We apply it to software that smuggles something unwanted onto our computers, but the original concept came from real people who once lived in ancient Greece. What ordinary or new words today might last two thousand years in the future: Dot-com? Internet? YOLO?

 • • • 

Not all cultures regard looking back into one’s past as a strange pursuit. Nor do they insist that family history is not also valid history. In fact, the reality that many westerners must actively search for their great-grandparents’ names because they don’t already know them appears odd to other cultures. Many Asian genealogies are tracked through deep time, and some cultures keep extraordinarily old family record books, adding the name of a new member when he or she is born. These genealogies are descendancy based, as opposed to ours, which are ascendancy based, the difference being that we put ourselves in the spotlight.

“China is where you want to be born if you want to easily do your family history research,” one researcher told me. “They have been keeping family history records . . . and have these wonderful family books,
jai pu
, where based on your surname you can go back and trace your ancestry for a couple of thousand years.” He continued, “I think westerners sometimes misunderstand the Chinese as
worshipping
their ancestors, but it’s really an incredibly deep cultural feeling that if you’re not connected to your descendants, your ancestors, and your siblings, you’re not . . . it’s like you’re not whole.”

In 2009 an official update charting the descendants of Confucius, “The Top Family on Earth,” was completed in China’s Shandong Province, where Confucius was born 2,560 years earlier. According to the revised tree, the ancient advocate for peace and social harmony fathered eighty-three generations numbering some two million individual descendants. (An earlier revision in 1937 counted only 600,000 descendants. The new version was the first to include women, overseas family members, and ethnic minorities, like seventy-one-year-old Muslim Kong Xiangxian from Yunnan Province. At the time of the update, the pantheon of Confucius’s living offspring included the childless ninety-year-old Kong Demao, the only direct descendent of Confucius in mainland China, and sixteen-year-old James Hung of West London, grandson of a clan elder and a big fan of Manchester United.)

In New Zealand’s Maori culture, there is a specialized lexicon for talking about families through time.
Whakapiri
is what Maori do when they work out what ancestors they have in common with others. The recitation of genealogy and stories that are passed from one generation down to the next is called
whakapapa
. It’s said that if a Maori learns his genealogy, he will be able to trace his way back through the millennia, person by person, to when his ancestors first arrived in New Zealand.

Many cultures in Africa have an equally strong oral tradition. In West Africa the
griot
is the person who memorizes all the histories and carries the group’s identity. In Somalia children under the age of ten learn their genealogy by heart—their lineage, their subfamily, and the larger clan group to which they belong for ten generations back.

Oddly, the critics of genealogy have little to say about the traditional role that the activity plays in other cultures. Yet it’s useful to recognize that people all over the world not only think quite deeply about who their ancestors were but also develop different strategies for preserving information about them. One of the biggest assumptions that lurks beneath all the criticism of genealogists is that the decay of information over the years is a natural erosion and that there’s something fussy or unnatural about interfering with it. But this is a sweeping assumption to make about a complicated state of affairs. There is nothing inevitable or organic about the informationscape we live in—it is not a landscape.

Quoidbach and Gilbert’s work reveals that the way we think about the past is not neutral but involves a psychology of existence and mortality that affects how we see ourselves in time. This psychology must be shaped to some extent by culture, because some cultures embrace their past in ways that westerners typically do not. Clearly, there are huge social forces at work here. Somewhere in the past we have made choices as a society and as individuals to keep some things and to let other things go. Why?

Let us now praise famous men, and our fathers that begat us.

—Wisdom of Sirach 44:1

F
or as long as people have written about genealogy, there have been precocious personal historians who were drawn to the topic at a young age. In the midnineteenth century, Jonathan Brown Bright of Massachusetts complained about his family’s lack of interest in its history: “Nobody but myself cares tu [
sic
] pence about it. . . . They are
not genealogists constitutionally.”

David Allen Lambert was born a century after Bright, and as far I know, they have no family connection, yet they are kin by predisposition. For over twenty years Lambert has worked at the New England Historic Genealogical Society, the oldest genealogical society in the world, but he became interested in his subject when he turned seven. He joined his hometown’s local history society when he was eleven, and when at age fourteen he first visited the NEHGS, he was stopped at the door and informed that he had to be accompanied by a parent or guardian. “
But they are not interested in genealogy,” he explained. He returned when he was seventeen and contributed a thirteen-page report with a hand-drawn portrait of his grandfather on the cover. He also started writing a guide to every cemetery in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. The book was published years later and is now considered a “cemetery bible,” celebrated for its exhaustive inclusion of the smallest gravestones in the most obscure cemeteries of the state. Finally in 2013 he was appointed the chief genealogist at the NEHGS. His original thirteen-page report is still in its archive.

I visited Lambert’s street-front alcove in a grand eight-story building on Newbury Street in Boston. He sported a neatly trimmed beard, which was going gray, and, though precise and respectful, he also had a few gentle genealogy jokes up his sleeve. (His grandmother’s surname was “Poor” and his grandfather used to say he went over the hill to the Poor house to get a bride.) Among the wooden panels, large chandeliers, and old books we spoke about his own history and the history of genealogy in America.

As a child Lambert found an unfamiliar photograph in the leaves of a book. His grandmother explained that it was of her parents. The idea that his eighty-year-old grandmother had once even had parents, let alone that they had been teenagers during the Civil War, was amazing to Lambert. He went on to discover that his grandmother’s uncle, who was blinded in the war, was a drummer boy at Abraham Lincoln’s funeral. He discovered that the son of his eighth-grandfather was a judge at the Salem witch trials and indeed was the only magistrate who later recanted. He also found one of the accused in his family tree. According to testimony, his ancestor Lady Mary Bradbury was seen running about her neighbor’s yard in the guise of a blue boar. Lambert was eventually able to trace his earliest line to King Cerdic of the West Saxons of Britain, who was born in the fifth century, at least forty-seven generations ago.

When Lambert started his investigating, there was no Internet. “You wrote a letter, sent it to England, and waited a month and a half, and maybe you got a response back, maybe you didn’t,” he told me. Ever the historian, he also used to go hunting for arrowheads when he was ten. He wanted to know who had dropped them, and he started to research the Indians who lived in his area. One day he went to a powwow, where someone told him, “There goes the chief of the Ponkapoag Indians.” Lambert walked up to the man and asked, “Who are you?” The man said his name was Clinton Wixon. Lambert said, “Oh, you’re Clarence Wixon’s son. Your father was killed by a girl, who had just got her license, while he was riding his bike. That means you’re Lydia Tinkham’s grandson, and your Tinkhams go into the Bancrofts and to the Burrells. That means you’re a Moho through the Momentaug family of the 1600s.”

“He looked at me, and his jaw dropped,” Lambert recalled. Later the Ponkapoag made him their tribal historian. When Lambert’s parents died, they invited him to a meeting of the tribe where they gave him an Algonquin name that means “one who brought their ancestors back to them that had once been lost, someone who seeks the past.” Essentially they call him “Past Finder.”

Lambert walked me through the NEHGS building (pausing to ask a guest to move her handbag from John Hancock’s chair), and we passed many beautiful nineteenth-century paintings of family groups and extraordinary hand-drawn charts and pedigrees from hundreds of years ago. One 1884 family tree was literally a tree. Etched with fine black lines, three large branches split at the base of a great wooden trunk. Another chart, hundreds of years old and many feet long, was drawn on vellum. Each individual was accompanied by a small, unique coat of arms, which combined and reproduced down the generations: bright golden lions, blue chevrons, and red and white checkerboards mixing again and again. In a state-of-the-art conservation lab, NEHGS staff preserve vellum, antique paper books, and even single sheets of paper, records that people used to carry in their back pockets in colonial times.

Now, as chief genealogist of the NEHGS, Lambert is one of the caretakers of its 2.8 million manuscripts. For him the building is America’s attic. “If somebody wrote a letter here in 1897 and sent some photographs or a document, we’ve had it ever since,” he said. Every day, he sits near the attic’s front door, and people walk in off the street and say to him, “I want to know about my grandfather. He was in WWII. Where do I find those records?” “My ancestor is a
Mayflower
descendant.” “My ancestor was a pilgrim.” “My ancestor was on board with Blackbeard.”

 • • • 

Genealogy, as we know it, can be traced to the Bible: Abraham begat Isaac who begat Jacob who begat Judas. Around the same time that the Old Testament was written down, Romans painted portraits of their forebears on the walls of atriums, connecting ancestors and descendants with garlands of ribbons. Modern Western genealogy began, of course, with the rise of the aristocracy. The powerful houses of Europe used genealogy to establish lines of succession and fortify dynastic ties through marriage.
Many modern genealogies can be tracked back to the 1600s, but only royal lineages—and only few of them—date to as early as the sixth century.

It took many hundreds of years to catch on, but the idea of a lineage became appealing to princely families by the twelfth century, particularly because it was a way of guaranteeing profit from a fiefdom. Members of the petty nobility believed the blood that ran through the veins of their ancestors also ran through theirs, and alongside it in the same direction flowed the wealth. They constructed pedigrees on rolls of parchment that were up to ten meters long. Around four hundred years after that the
bourgeoisie adopted the practice.

When Europeans traveled to the New World, they took their ideas about ancestry and their genealogies with them. In colonial America one of genealogy’s most important functions was to establish pedigree. Letters from colonists to family in England requested family information, testifying to the common interest in establishing connections. Some colonists sealed their letters with heraldic stamps and had coats of arms incorporated in their portraits or engraved into their silver, while others used English titles or indicated in some other way that they came from somewhere that mattered. Women embroidered family trees. Genealogy at its simplest involved the simple transcription of family names and birth dates in a special book or a Bible. The gravestone of Captain John Fowle, who was buried in 1711 in Charlestown, Massachusetts, bears a coat of arms with a lion, side view, paw raised, and three flowers. A 1658 gravestone in the Abingdon churchyard in Virginia reads:

To the lasting memory of Major Lewis Burwell

Of the county of Gloucester in Virginia,

Gentleman, who descended from the

Ancient family of Burwells, of the

Counties of Bedford and Northampton.

Establishing a connection to power wasn’t the only reason for tracing family in colonial America. Benjamin Franklin, born in 1706, was one of the nation’s most famous early citizens. An extraordinary polymath, he began his life apprenticed to a printer and went on to found what was at the time America’s most read newspaper. He wrote for the paper and other publications (often under a pseudonym) and invented an amazing array of devices, including a musical instrument and an energy-efficient stove, not to mention swim fins. Franklin’s kite experiment to explore the nature of lightning has, of course, become a permanent chapter in the history of America, as well as the history of science. He was also an antislavery activist, and in later years he contributed to the American Declaration of Independence, as well as spending time in Paris as a diplomat. He had time for genealogy too.

On a trip to England with his son William, Franklin took a side trip to investigate his family roots in Wellingborough, Acton, and Banbury in Northamptonshire. Throughout his life Franklin identified as a printer, and he remained proud of his working-class origins. Eager simply to inquire about the history of his family, he and William visited cemeteries and read church registers. He established that the first mention of his forebears was the 1563 baptism in Acton Church of Robert Franklin, son of Thomas. Franklin met a number of British cousins, and when he returned to America, he stayed in touch with one of them, Mary Fisher of Wellingborough. If the language of their correspondence is archaic, the tone of the exchange will be familiar to people born in the twentieth century who have contacted distant relatives in another country and shared family stories over a cup of tea. As Franklin wrote to Mary:

I am the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest Son of the youngest Son for five Generations; . . . had there originally been any Estate in the Family none could have stood a worse Chance for it.

She responded:

I am the last of my Fathers House remaining in this Country, and . . . cannot hope to continue long in the Land of the Living. . . . I was well pleased to see so fair Hopes of its Continuance in the Younger Branches, in any Part of the World, and on that Account most sincerely wish you and Yours all Health Happiness and Prosperity.

In its most stripped-down form, genealogy was a crucial record of the people to whom you were connected at a time when many families were on the move and society was in a kind of permanent upheaval. Genealogy also memorialized those who passed on. Family genealogists recorded the children who died of scarlet fever or at birth, as well as the successive wives or husbands who from one calamity or another disappeared on the frontier. The 1793 gravestone of Major John Farrar in Shrewsbury, Massachusetts, bears the names of his seven children, “Patty, John, Lucy, Lucy, Patty, Hannah, Releas,” nearly all of whom perished within a year of their births; only one child made it to the age of three.
In an 1815 letter Leverett Saltonstall told his younger sister that he was creating a record of their ancestors before the information was lost forever, noting, “It is astonishing how little is preserved.”

Recording the facts of one’s own or an ancestor’s life also took on a moral and religious significance for some people. Colonists put down a record of their days in order to inspire future descendants; Puritans believed a “Register of the genealogies of New England’s Sons and Daughters” would be used on the last day.

 • • • 

According to François Weil, even from its beginnings American genealogy was a “
product of tangled impulses.” Weil, who is the chancellor of universities at L’Académie de Paris, is the author of
Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America
. His curiosity about American genealogy was piqued in 2008 by the intense interest in Barack and Michelle Obama’s families when Obama was elected president. The ancestry of America’s presidents has always been a topic of general public interest, but the Obamas were the subject of particular attention because they were the first African American first family. Barack Hussein Obama was born in Hawaii to Barack Obama Sr., a black Kenyan government economist, and Stanley Ann Dunham, a white American anthropologist from Kansas. Genealogists tracked Obama’s descent from Irish, German, French, Swiss, and mostly English Americans through his mother and from Kenyan Africans through his father. Ongoing research has gleefully noted his family connections to other famous Americans like Sarah Palin, Warren Buffett, Brad Pitt, and even George W. Bush.

When Obama entered the White House, it was thought that because his father was from Kenya he had no links to slavery in the United States.
Michelle Obama’s family history was thought to be more typical of many Americans because it included black and white Americans, slaves, Confederate soldiers, and preachers. But in 2012 a team from Ancestry.com revealed one of the strangest twists in the story of the Obama family. It turned out that Obama descended from one of the nation’s first African slaves, John Punch, via his white mother. A resident of Virginia and Maryland in the mid-1600s, Punch was an indentured servant and, after an escape attempt, was sentenced to a life of servitude.

Clearly, genealogy reveals not just how people build their own identities but also how others view them. Since the election of the forty-fourth president, a fringe political group known as “birthers” has campaigned relentlessly to invalidate Obama’s presidency on genealogical grounds. In the face of much evidence to the contrary, birthers claim the president was born in Kenya and therefore has no constitutional right to run for the highest office of the United States.

Despite the amount of attention given to Obama’s origins, Weil could find no contemporary account of what genealogy has meant to Americans throughout their history. In fact, he wrote, genealogy is “
arguably the element of contemporary American culture about which we know the least.” It is striking that the first person to carry out an extensive study of American genealogy is a Frenchman.

Weil set out to catalog America’s genealogical motivations over four centuries and he found many. But in certain periods some were more important than others.