The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  Constructing a history out of all these pieces of information ultimately enables us to understand how the events that occur within our own tiny envelope of existence map onto the stories that extend over long timescales; how lifetimes are shaped by eras and populations; how the lives of ordinary people shape eras; and how much the past makes us who we are and how free are we from it. Using written records, cultural history, and DNA also makes it much easier to understand that the vast forces that shaped the history of the world shaped you and your family as well. And the arrow points both ways: Your family has shaped world history.

  But here is the problem with finding out what gets passed down: We often feel strongly that we already know what comes down to us, how it comes down, what it looks like, and how it affects us. First, then, we have to examine our fundamental notions about what gets passed down—which, of course, are themselves passed down.

  Part I

  Ideas About What Is Passed

  Down Are Passed Down

  Chapter 1

  Do Not Ask What Gets Passed Down

  Yet why not say what happened?

  —Robert Lowell, “Epilogue”

  In the lunch line at the local Returned & Services League in Parramatta, Australia, I stood behind two elderly ladies who were comparing notes on their relatives. We were attending a genealogy road show, a modest gathering in a modest town, similar in size and scope to thousands of family history meetings all over the world. At this particular event freelance historians and genealogists-for-hire offered lectures on topics like ship manifests and military history, while archivists advised about document search. The exhibit hall was busy with stalls from companies like Ancestry.com, as well as local societies with an ultrasmall niche, like cricket club records from the 1800s or employee records from the railroad. One group helped convict descendants connect with one another. In Australia being able to link yourself to a convict is something of a genealogical jackpot, much like status in other countries might be conferred by membership in the General Society of Mayflower Descendants, the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, or Son of a Witch in Massachusetts.

  I wandered the display hall, had software explained to me, spoke to experts, and chatted with attendees, but the point of the gathering remained weirdly elusive. A powerful force had brought these people together, but even though they seemed to agree that that force mattered a lot, no one could explain to me precisely how or why.

  The ladies in front of me spoke of their lineages as if they were discussing recipes (You do this, then this, then this) or perhaps comparing flowers in their gardens (Oh, you have one of those too!). The lunch line was slow, so the comparisons went on and on, and every time they mentioned another person in their respective family trees a bead of sweat popped up under my hairline. Dear God, here were only two people, yet they had so many cousins, and they kept piling them on. It wasn’t what they were saying that unnerved me; it was the numerical implications. Consider: If everyone has four grandparents, then she has eight great-grandparents, which means she has sixteen great-great-grandparents and thirty-two great-great-great-grandparents, so that in five generations, everyone has sixty-two people to account for, and that’s just the people in one’s direct line.

  If you count the siblings of direct ancestors, the numbers are, frankly, disconcerting. Even if your own parents had no brothers or sisters, chances are that the further back you go, the more siblings exist in your family line. It was common in the nineteenth century for families to have five or eight or even more than ten children, so if you want to explore the fortunes that have befallen your family in the relatively recent past, you could easily be looking for three hundred people or more. If you have a child, his heritage effectively doubles the calculation. In order to trace the unique tree from which he branched, you must put together your own crowded lineage with that of your partner’s.

  This was too much to think about. How could I survey this whole when it was so paralyzingly big? How could I understand these people when each of them represented so many thousands of diverse lives? When my husband was a graduate student, he had to physically brace himself every time he walked into the university library, as the sight of all those books, written by all those people, about so many more people, with references to even more people who had written many more books about other people, was too much to contemplate. Or rather, what was too much was the multiplicity of the books plus the intrusive realization that he would never in his lifetime be able to read them all. Hundreds of people blithely stepped over the library’s threshold all day long, but for CB, to catch a glimpse of the library’s immense holdings was to come face to face with his own mortality. I felt much the same at this gathering. How could so many individuals have existed, each passing something on before he or she died? All I wanted to do was chat with some keen hobbyists, but now Death was tapping me on the shoulder in Parramatta.

  After a few minutes, though, I started to take in what all the attendees were looking at: hundreds and hundreds of historical documents, self-published books, CD-ROMs with lists of lists of names, databases chock-full of people who had once lived and whom no living person now remembered. Everyone in this hall was looking for someone who was gone forever.

  Still, even in the presence of all this data, I couldn’t seem to find a way to actually get inside the story of family history and world history and the history of all this history, and it wasn’t just a problem with this particular road show. Since I had started telling people about the subject of my book, I had received a lot of polite encouragement, but there was a constant buzz of skepticism as well. “Genealogy?” said a friend. “That’s like those people who believe in past lives, isn’t it? And they’re always Cleopatra, never an anonymous slave.”

  • • •

  The activity of tracing’s one’s lineage does not, in fact, have a great reputation. One of genealogy’s purported offenses is that it has all the real-world verifiability of astrology. That, at least, was a proposition I could explore. But the thing about astrology is that you don’t tend to find lots of people being outraged by it. Where genealogy was concerned, I met many people who proclaimed their indifference to it, but it was often an extremely vigorous indifference.

  “Oh, it’s a real American thing,” one person observed. “Everyone I spoke to there does it.”

  Others objected because it was not “real history,” being too personal.

  Some assumed that because genealogists were not trained archivists, even when they did find a valuable old document with a relative’s name or story in it, they didn’t know what they were looking at.

  Critics with more existential concerns argued that even if you had access to this or that document from someone’s past, you could never determine from it what he or she was truly like.

  In fact, I soon discovered, the criticisms of genealogy were legion. Genealogists were overly romantic. Genealogists were elitist. Genealogists were divisive. Genealogy, wrote Guardian columnist Zoe Williams, “conveys a silent prejudice that never has the guts to announce itself. Ferreting about for antecedents in parish records says, effectively: ‘I attach a certain value to having always come from Suffolk or wherever. Oh, no, no, no, I don’t mean being foreign is bad, I just mean it’s so much nicer not to be.’”

  The Times journalist Sathnam Sanghera offered some of the most blistering criticisms of family history: “Show me a genealogist and I’ll show you someone who is basically obsessed with proving that they come from royal, aristocratic or celebrity lineage. Creepy and boring.” Sanghera, who wrote a 336-page book about his own life as a young Sikh growing up in Wolverhampton in the eighties, added: “And before anyone points out the hypocrisy of a memoirist slagging off genealogy, life writing and genealogy are completely different. One being the equivalent of an interest in music, the other the equivalent of an interest in hi-fi equipment. Though perhaps a better way
of putting it is that genealogy is the academic equivalent of endlessly googling yourself.”

  In a blog post titled Genealogy is Bunk, science writer Richard Conniff took the argument further. “The rich and famous . . . used to be the only ones who bothered with family history. It was a way to maintain their power, by asserting that they’d always been here and therefore always would be. Curiously, biologists doing long-term studies of primates in the wild say that’s how family connections function in nature, too: In high-ranking baboon and vervet monkey families, grandmothers routinely make sure that little Tiffany Baboon and young Percy Vervet III get special treatment from lesser juveniles. This gives the kids a habit of social dominance—and can thus help maintain a monkey dynasty for generations.”

  Like many critics, Conniff was convinced that in addition to being bunk on the grounds of egalitarianism, genealogy was bunk on evidentiary grounds as well: “Go back ten generations in any family, and the odds are that someone has climbed unacknowledged up the family tree. Sir Winston Churchill prided himself on his descent from the great eighteenth-century general John Churchill, Duke of Marlborough. But the family had a colorful history of sexual misadventure; Winston’s own father died of syphilis, and his mother was said to have taken 200 lovers during the course of their marriage.” How representative was this privileged woman of the paternity rates in her culture or another? Many critics invoked the specter of illegitimacy as a problem for genealogy.

  Conniff explained that his teen daughter was a genealogy buff and that he wanted her to know that “nothing in her genealogy defines her.” Really? If a person’s genealogy is the series of individuals whose coupling eventually produced that person, then it’s hard to see how this assertion is plausible: Surely some part of our identity has come down to us through our parents from our grandparents and from their parents. What we inherited needn’t be physical, and it needn’t be direct. The way people think about themselves is to some extent a reaction to the ideas about identity that were transmitted in their families. If you take genealogy to include all the qualities that characterize the people who are part of your lineage—not just their biologies but also their unique histories (their cultures, their choices, their personalities, and the significant events they lived through)—then the influence that these factors had on them, and in turn had on you, is an open and interesting question. Indeed, the more I considered the case made by the antigenealogists, the less clear it became to me that they knew enough about how these hard-to-define aspects of life are transmitted over the course of generations to conclude that they don’t actually shape us.

  What about the fact that people are literally created from material that comes from their parents and, before that, from their parents’ parents? Facial features, for example, are strongly hereditary. What about the fact that how we look often affects how we think about ourselves? I am not arguing that the unique combination of DNA that we inherit from our parents completely, or even mostly, determines who we are or how we see ourselves, but it certainly contributes to it.

  While the extent to which we are shaped by the DNA we inherit, and by the degree to which we are influenced by the world in which we grow up (which may largely influence us through the DNA we inherit), is contentious, no one factor in any part of anyone’s life defines him or her. I will return to these ideas later, but for now we can at least say this: If you are someone’s biological child, then by definition your DNA came from him or her. You might be raised by people who had nothing to do with your actual conception, and you will no doubt be influenced by their culture. Your genes too will be molded by many aspects of the environment in which you are raised, but your DNA comes to you through your genealogy.

  Even if you end up with a version of a gene that neither your mother nor your father possessed, it was created out of the DNA they passed on to you. Even if you end up with a trait that neither of your parents had, your DNA may underpin that trait, and your DNA came from them. Indeed, none of the stuff that is you would hold together in the shape of a human being without the underlying genetic codes, which will continue to function throughout your life.

  What was it about family history that inspired so much umbrage? No one rants about self-indulgent knitters or accuses tennis players of being emotionally void. Yet there was a special level of scorn reserved for the world’s genealogists. It seemed that a sophisticated worldview precluded thinking about the questions that the Parramatta hobbyists had gathered to ask: What do we have in common with our ancestors? What don’t we have in common? What in our lives came to us from them? The more I thought about it, the larger the gap seemed between the real people I met at the road show and the educated consensus on the futility of their quest.

  • • •

  It wasn’t just journalists and science writers who dismissed curiosity about one’s lineage; academics did too. One professor of psychology told me: “I find it offensive that people fractionate themselves and find meaning in that. It means nothing; it says nothing about who you are.” A historian observed, “People only want a family history of themselves that serves their identity at the moment. When it’s something ugly, they want it erased.”

  When I asked an archivist about the attitude in his field, he told me: “It is still a pervasive idea that the genealogists are not our friends, and they’re not really users, they’re just sort of dilettante hobbyists that are consuming resources.”

  Even among the geneticists to whom I spoke, those who had looked into their family past were sometimes bashful about admitting it: It’s just a bit of fun, you know?

  In a 2012 essay in the New York Review of Books, Richard Lewontin, a Harvard professor of biology, mentioned his role as treasurer for the Marlboro Historical Society in Vermont, where he fields requests for copies of a history of Marlboro written over two hundred years ago by the Reverend Ephraim Newton. The history includes a great deal of genealogical information, and, Lewontin wrote, “Over and over, our correspondents write of the ‘pride’ they have in descending from these early settlers.” He continued:

  Surely pride or shame are appropriate sentiments for actions for which we ourselves are in some way responsible. Why, then, do we feel pride (or shame) for the actions of others over whom we can have had no influence? Do we, in this way, achieve a false modesty or relieve ourselves of the burdens of our own behavior?

  Later Lewontin discussed the idea that Jews may share a genetic legacy and that this is considered “a source of group identity and pride.” He reiterated:

  Once again we have the question of why having knowledge of remote ancestors and a shared history makes us “proud.” Is it that preening ourselves before the glass of history seems less egotistical than inspecting our images in the glass of fashion?

  Lewontin’s dismissal is unmistakable, and yet by the same argument we probably shouldn’t feel any satisfaction when our favorite football team wins a game. Usually we do, though, and perhaps genealogy is no more complicated than that—the impulse to cheer on the home team, even if most of the team is dead. At any rate, if it’s not appropriate to have feelings about belonging to a group that is genetically or historically connected, where should the cutoff be? Can we be proud of our grandparents? By Lewontin’s measure, no, because we have had no influence over their actions. But the same would go for much of our parents’ lives too. There’s something nihilistic about asking, Why should we feel proud? The implied question is Why should we feel anything? Well, why not?

  Around the same time that Lewontin’s essay was published, obituaries announced the death of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who was born in 1925 in Aiken, South Carolina. In 2003 Washington-Williams announced at a press conference that she was the illegitimate daughter of Strom Thurmond, a white American congressman, and Carrie Butler, an African American teen who worked as a maid in the Thurmond household. By the time Washington-Williams was in her early twenties, Thurmond was governor of South Carolina.
Later he became a long-standing senator in the U.S. Congress and at one time ran for the office of U.S. president. A strict segregationist, he said: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.”

  Washington-Williams waited until Thurmond died before she publicly revealed that he was her father. “My children deserve the right to know from whom, where and what they have come,” she said. “I am committed in teaching them and helping them to learn about their past. It is their right to know and understand the rich history of their ancestry, black and white.” Washington-Williams was a mother of four, a grandmother of thirteen, and a great-grandmother of four by the time she wrote her memoir in 2005. It’s hard to imagine her descendants feeling nothing as they think about her past.

  When she finished her historic announcement, the elegant and assured Washington-Williams spoke of the “great sense of peace” that came over her when she decided to share the details of her family’s history. For some, no doubt for many, the details of their own lineage, and certainly that of others, may be banal. But when those details are lost or suppressed, they can take on an enormous power.

  • • •

  Perhaps neither question—Why should we feel proud? or Why shouldn’t we feel proud?—can take us far. But it is surely interesting to ask, Why do we feel proud? because quite clearly many people do. Even Lewontin allows that all cultures in every era have been interested in ancestry. Were they motivated by pride, sorrow, amusement, or curiosity? It’s surprisingly hard to answer this question.