The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  Wendy Roth, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, says that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be a genealogist when she grew up: “I was always the family record keeper.” But Roth’s family was Jewish, and because of the disruptions of World War II they didn’t know much about earlier generations. “There is a sense that other people can do genealogy, but for us the records are gone,” Roth explained. “I have one friendship with a woman in England who traced her family back to the 1500s and I’ve always lived a little vicariously through her.”

  Once, when Roth was backpacking in Europe, she visited Rymanów, Poland, the town that had been home to one of her great-grandfathers. The only traces of the Jewish community that once lived there were the ruins of a synagogue. Roth met a man who must have been in his eighties, and they communicated in a traveler’s mix of drawing and impromptu sign language. She told him she wanted to find the old Jewish cemetery, and he led her up a steep hillside. “It was hard for me to keep up with him,” she recalled. “He was so spry.” They reached an area of chest-high weeds where the cemetery had been, and he mimed to her that he was a small child during the war. “He acted out that in this cemetery the Nazis had come, and they had lined up Jews, and then opened fire on all of them, and then they took the gravestones and used them to pave a road.” Roth’s guide then pointed to the road the Nazis had built, which lay beneath them, down the hill.

  To feel that she finally stood somewhere that her ancestors had stood was an extraordinary experience for Roth. About fifteen years later, she and her husband traveled to Švencionys, Lithuania, where, she believed, a great-great-grandfather must have lived. There had once been a vibrant Jewish community there. Unusually, the Jewish cemetery was still intact: “We were crawling around again, it was totally overgrown, lots of stones fallen over but mostly in one piece.” They had a translator with them to help find the gravestones for the family, including one for Roth’s great-great-grandfather. When Roth saw it, she realized that it also held the name of her great-great-great-grandfather. It was the first time she had learned his name.

  It was “unbelievable,” she said. “Absolutely unbelievable. I was in tears.” Why was this encounter so emotional? “It’s a feeling of breaking through a wall. Of the frustration of wanting to know more about your family and your past and what people’s lives were like, and where they came from, and who they were, and what their personal stories were, and feeling like you’re never going to be able to uncover that. Once you have that feeling of that great mystery, any piece of information feels like a treasure trove. Whether it’s a name or a place where somebody once was, it’s a form of a connection that you thought you were never going to have.”

  Roth interviewed many people who traced their family histories (see more on this in chapter 12), and she was always struck by the difficulty they had explaining what exactly compelled them. “With avid genealogists and especially genetic genealogists, I try to get at the question of why they are interested,” she said. “What is amazing to me is that people can’t articulate it. It’s like it is such a basic urge or a basic primal interest that they have a really hard time putting it into words. Some people try, and they’ll give you answers that sound a little clichéd. They’ll talk about wanting to find their own place in history, or wanting to know where they came from, or they’ll talk about it making history more interesting to them, but the level of commitment of a lot of people means to me that it must go deeper than that.”

  I came across Wendy Roth when I started looking for general studies of genealogy. Someone, I reasoned, must have investigated the psychology of family history or, surely, examined how different philosophies of heredity have shaped this ubiquitous human experience. I asked genealogists, geneticists, historians, and others whose work invoked in some way questions of inheritance and history, but none could point me to a body of work on which he or she relied.

  Apart from Roth, a few scholars have investigated the topic, but usually only briefly and in isolation. This seemed odd. After all, historians acknowledge that attitudes and even feelings are passed down culturally. Economists study the way socioeconomic status, especially poverty, is reproduced. Psychologists, social scientists, and even English professors recognize that the family is a powerful engine of inheritance. Most scholars of human behavior accept that individuals are shaped in some way by the people who raised them and that even a family unit may possess a character. Yet there was apparently no field that brought together all these ideas about inheritance.

  • • •

  Like Roth, I became my own family’s historian. But even though the fragments of past generations I glimpsed struck me as wondrous, I did not dig down for a long time. When I did begin to look further into my family’s past, I experienced a strange array of emotions, including relief and contentment, but there was despair too.

  I found myself drawn to one ancestor and then another, and sometimes a single detail was all it took for me to feel, at least for a little while, that I had a relationship with them. The day I realized that I could learn about Julia Dillon, my father’s great-grandmother, was a revelation to me. She was one of my sixteen great-grandparents, and I had heard her name many times but knew nothing about her. I couldn’t explain why I had never thought about her as an actual person who left physical traces in time.

  I found her name on a ship’s register and was stunned to learn that in 1862 she brought her four children by herself from Ireland to Australia on a ship called the Lightning. At the time I had two small children of my own, and I did everything in my power to avoid taking them with me to the supermarket, where they made a trip through the dairy section feel like The Odyssey. How did Julia manage her children on that long voyage?

  Once she arrived in Australia, Julia reunited with her husband, Daniel, who had arrived on an earlier voyage. The family lived for a while on the goldfields of rural Victoria, and Julia had five more children. Like so many families of that era, Julia’s lost children along the way. Jeremiah died at fifteen of a fever. Johanna died at eighteen while she was in service in a small country town. I found the browned, crisp transcript of the inquest into her death in the state archives. She had been complaining of pain and was sent to bed. Her employer, Elizabeth Farrell, later checked on her. “I found her very hot and racked with pain,” she said. “I proposed to give her a mustard plaster.” The doctor was summoned and he gave her a dose of medicine and then ordered another dose. “Ought the medicine make her as sick?” wondered Farrell. They left poor Johanna alone, and later Farrell climbed the stairs to look in on her. For a minute she thought she was asleep, but Johanna was gone. “I found her dead,” Farrell said. She then called out to the manager that “Johanna was dead in the bed.”

  Despite the resilience that characterized most of Julia’s life, the hardship of her days flattened me. Once, while I was attending a conference in the United States, I woke at 5:00 a.m. with jet lag after covering in a day approximately the same distance that it took Julia forty days to cross. I told a genealogist at the conference that the thought of her hardships made me sad.

  “But you can be impressed by her!” the genealogist replied, and I was.

  I began to shake the malaise when it occurred to me one day that even though I had all sorts of complicated feelings about Julia, I had no idea what she would have thought of me. Who was I to her? Merely one of her son’s many granddaughters. Here is the brutal asymmetry of a big family and time. Julia sits at a node in our family tree from which many, many branches sprout. I, on the other hand, am a twig. Even if she were alive, I’m not sure I would mean much to her.

  Later I found a photo of Julia. She was about seventy at the time, and it was hard to tell if she was just small in stature or shrunken by age. She wore a frilly black dress and a black bonnet, which was secured under her neck with white flowers arrayed at the front. Her eyelids dragged down at their corners. I suspected the photo ha
d been taken to commemorate a death in the family. Did her eyes, light and inscrutable, reflect sorrow? Was it exhaustion? I still don’t know what it means to have a relationship with her, but that was, without a doubt, my father’s nose on her face.

  • • •

  How do we personally lose or find information about our lineage? Our tendency is to assume that whatever we don’t know about ourselves or our families has simply fallen away naturally, through attrition over time. Certainly, memory has absolute limits, but there are psychological forces at work too.

  In 2012 Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and a colleague wrote about an experiment they had carried out where people in different age groups were asked about either what they had liked, valued, or prioritized ten years earlier or how much they thought their current preferences were likely to change over the next ten years. The scientists found that their subjects were pretty good at assessing how much they had changed in the previous ten years, which was always a considerable amount. By contrast, the participants in the study always underestimated how much they were likely to change in the next ten years. In fact, they didn’t think they were going to change much at all.

  According to Quoidbach and his colleagues, people have a tendency to think of the present as a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” The researchers dubbed the phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” and they showed that it applied to personality traits, core values, and even best friends. Quoidbach found that the older people got, the less pronounced the illusion was, yet even the oldest subjects believed they had finally become the person they would be for the rest of their lives. “History,” wrote the researchers, “is always ending today.”

  Perhaps the end-of-history illusion also applies to the way people think about generational time. We live in a temporal envelope. For most of us the horizon extends forward maybe two generations and back just two or three. It is hard to break out of the mind-set that we stand at a crucial center point of that span and that all the people who came before were merely precursors to us. It isn’t until you populate the family tree out that it becomes clear how brief a human life is, how soon it is over, and how you only play a bit part in a story line that expands out and contracts back and goes off in directions that no one can predict or control.

  People who dig into their lineage may find it a startling corrective to the feeling that they exist at the apogee of an arc, one that has been heading inexorably toward them and that only gracefully declines away from them. Or maybe people delve into their past because they have started to lose their “presentism” for other reasons. It is telling that the most common triggers for a genealogical quest are major life events, such as the death of a parent or a grandparent or the birth of a child or grandchild, events that typically cause people to stop and consider the more existential questions: Where do I come from? Where do I go from here? What is my legacy?

  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. Acc
ording 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.