The Invisible History of the Human Race

by Christine Kenneally

  Special thanks to Gisela Heidenreich, Gudrun Sarkar, and Wolfgang Gliebe.

  Special thanks to Gisela Heidenreich, Gudrun Sarkar, and Wolfgang Gliebe.

  Thank you to everyone who spoke to me off the record and without attribution.

  Thank you to Debra Hine, without whom this would have taken years longer, and to Daniela Diedrich. Good luck with your PhD! Thank you, Eric Maisel.

  Thank you, Razib Khan.

  Thanks Gavan McCarthy for the Heinlein quote. Thank you, Helen Harris, for your brilliant expertise and special thanks to Alison Alexander for a delightful afternoon.

  Thank you to the Abbotsford Convent and all who work there.

  Thank you lovely Stephen Armstrong for an opportunity that made me think above and beyond.

  Thank you to my far-flung writers groups, including Simon Caterson and Cordelia Fine. Thank you, Anne Baker and John Katinos, for your warm friendship and accommodation. You too, PP. Special thanks to Sheri Fink, Susan Cain, Monica Dux, Caleb Crain, Peter Terzian, Libba Bray, and Marci Alboher.

  Amanda Schaffer, you are an inspiration, and I owe you one!

  Shelagh Lloyd, you are kind and brilliant.

  Thank you so much to everyone at Viking and William Morris Endeavor, including Francesca Belanger, Hilary Roberts, Nicholas Bromley, Hal Fessenden, Shannon Twomey, and especially to my editor, Rick Kot, and my agent, Jay Mandel.

  Some of the words in the book have previously appeared in articles I wrote for the Sunday Age, the Good Weekend, the Monthly, MIT Technology Review, NewYorker.com, and other publications. My thanks to John van Tiggelen, Ben Naparstek, Mary-Anne Toy, Brian Bergstein, Jay Kang, and the other magazine editors who have engaged with this work.

  Thanks as always, Nessie, for lending me your books.

  Thanks for sharing your tree Bob and Eileen Jukes.

  Thank you Damien Kenneally and Mary Kenneally.

  Thank you Conrad Mackle, Angela Kenneally, Michael Jukes, and Allen Baldwin.

  With deep gratitude to my mother and father and to Hugh, Katherine, Steve, Angie, Mick, Shelagh and Simon.

  Three billion bases of thanks and love to Chris Baldwin, Nat, and Fin.

  NOTES

  Author’s Note

  “blurred, if not dissolved”: McCormick further explains his approach in Jonathan Shaw, “Who Killed the Men of England?” Harvard Magazine, July–August 2009, available at http://harvardmagazine.com/2009/07/who-killed

  -the-men-england.

  Introduction

  the QWERTY design: Jared Diamond popularized the problem of QWERTY, as he has many other issues of path-dependent history.

  Chapter 1: Do Not Ask What Gets Passed Down

  Genealogy, wrote Guardian columnist Zoe Williams: Z. Williams, “Ancestor Worship,” Guardian, November 8, 2006, available at http://www.the guardian.com/commentisfree/2006/nov/08/comment.zoewilliams.

  “Show me a genealogist”: S. Sanghera, “Every family has a story—but don’t tell me,” Times, April 7, 2010, available at http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/opinion/columnists/sathnamsanghera/article2470220.ece.

  Genealogy is Bunk: R. Conniff, “Genealogy is Bunk,” Strange Behaviors, July 1, 2007, available at http://strangebehaviors.wordpress.com/2007/07/01/genealogy-is-bunk/.

  Richard Conniff: Despite his reservations, Conniff also acknowledged some of the pleasures of family history. He wrote that he would like to know more about his family name, which in Irish means, “son of a black hound.” He also confessed to a deep curiosity about his “Italian great-grandfather, who used to chase his father down Webster Avenue in the Bronx swinging a sickle and yelling, ‘I catch-a you, I keel-a you.’”

  the Reverend Ephraim Newton: R. Lewontin, “Is There a Jewish Gene?” New York Review of Books, December 6, 2012, 59 (19).

  “All the laws of Washington”: A. Clymer, “Strom Thurmond, Foe of Integration, Dies at 100,” New York Times, June 27, 2003, available at http://www.nytimes.com/2003/06/27/us/strom-thurmond-foe-of-integration

  -dies-at-100.html.

  “I was always the family record keeper”: Quotes from Wendy Roth in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

  In 2012 Jordi Quoidbach: J. Quoidbach, D. T. Gilbert, and T. D. Wilson, “The End of History Illusion,” Science 339, no. 6115 (2013): 96–98.

  the novelist Will Self: E. Day, “Will Self: I Don’t Write for Readers,” Guardian, August 5, 2012, available at http://www.theguardian.com/books/2012/aug/05/will-self-umbrella-booker-interview.

  A famous study compared: J. Henrich, S. J. Heine, and A. Norenzayan, “The Weirdest People in the World?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 33, no. 2–3 (2010): 61–83.

  Chapter 2: The History of Family History

  “not genealogists constitutionally”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013). I was greatly influenced by Weil’s book. It was a wonderful source as well as a window onto a body of work it would have otherwise taken me years to track down. Many of the examples in this chapter of the development of genealogy in America either came from it or pointed me toward fruitful further research.

  “But they are not interested in genealogy”: Quotes from David Allen Lambert in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  Many modern genealogies: We don’t know how the much larger proportion of the population that wasn’t literate thought about family or tracked heritage at this time, but if they didn’t think about it at all, they would be one of the only groups who didn’t.

  bourgeoisie adopted the practice: C. Klapisch-Zuber, “The Genesis of the Family Tree,” I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance 4 (1991): 105–29.

  In an 1815 letter: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 42.

  “product of tangled impulses”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 4.

  Michelle Obama’s family history: Initially traced up to five generations back on all branches by genealogist Megan Smolyenak.

  “arguably the element”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 2.

  “These questions are not for publick information”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 42.

  “Our age is retrospective”: R. W. Emerson, Nature, 1856, available at: http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/emerson/nature-emerson-a.html.

  “When I talk with a genealogist”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 47.

  “excessively aristocratical”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 81.

  “witnessed the emergence of the first generation”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 158.

  “Daniel Webster”: F. Weil, Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2013), 49.

  Chapter 3: The Worst Idea in History

  make a “stamp” on offspring: R. J. Wood, “The Sheep Breeders’ View of Heredity (1723–1843),” in Proceedings of the 2nd Conference: A Cultural History of Heredity (Berlin: Max Plank Institute, 2003).

  “Flying squarely in the face”: Breeders Gazette, available at http://www.ans

  .iastate.edu/history/faculty/bakewell/bakewell.html.

  psychological traits being passed down: C. López Beltrán, “Heredity Old and New: French Physicians and L’hérédité naturelle in Early 19th Century,” in A Cultural History of Heredity II: 18th and 19th Centuries (Berlin: Max

  -Planck-Institute for the History of Science, 2003), 7–19, av
ailable at http://search.wellcomelibrary.org/iii/mobile/record/C__Rb1748331__Sheredity__P0,10__Orightresult__X6.

  eugenics could be a new religion: F. Galton, “Eugenics: Its Definition, Scope, and Aims,” American Journal of Sociology 10, no. 1 (1904): 1–25.

  moments in Grant’s intellectual development: J. Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, VT: University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 2009).

  “The African Pygmy”: J. Spiro, Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant (Burlington, VT: University Press of New England, Hanover and London, 2009), 46.

  “The immigrant laborers”: M. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race

  (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://archive

  .org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft_djvu.txt.

  “This is a practical, merciful and inevitable solution”: M. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingof

  greatra00granuoft_djvu.txt.

  “The cross between a white man”: M. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://archive

  .org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft

  _djvu.txt.

  The Passing of the Great Race was his Bible: I found this story mentioned many times in articles and books but could not locate a definitively original source.

  “the most valuable classes”: M. Grant, The Passing of the Great Race,

  (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1936 4th ed.), available at https://

  archive.org/stream/passingofgreatra00granuoft/passingofgreatra00granuoft

  _djvu.txt.

  “Pure + Pure”: Marriages-Fit and Unfit photograph, ID 11508, Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory DNA Learning Center, available at http://www.dnalc.org/view/11508--Marriages-Fit-and-Unfit-.html.

  the transmission of “defective strains”: American Breeders Magazine 3 (1912; reprint, London: Forgotten Books, 2013).

  “determine the fate of our society”: Unless otherwise noted, all Popenoe quotes are from P. Popenoe and R. H. Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan, 1918), p 341–49.

  A 1925 book reviewer: “Whither Marriage?” New York Times, April 19, 1930, p. 85.

  “the sacred thread of immortality”: P. Popenoe and R. H. Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 351, available at http://hdl.handle

  .net/1805/1042.

  “From an historical point of view”: P. Popenoe and R. H. Johnson, Applied Eugenics (New York: Macmillan, 1918), 184, available at http://hdl.handle

  .net/1805/1043.

  before contracts were signed: Such detective agencies had been around since the 1890s. My main source for information on Japanese eugenics was

  J. Robertson, “Blood Talks: Eugenic Modernity and the Creation of New Japanese,” History and Anthropology 13, no. 3 (2002): 191–216.

  Chapter 4: The Reich Genealogical Authority

  “family in the service of Rassen”: Quotes from Joe Mauch in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  genealogists had significant social influence: E. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), pp. xx and 234. Much of my history of genealogy in Nazi Germany comes from personal communications with Ehrenreich and from his book.

  “effects of racial crossing”: This analysis and the following, including the observation about Darwin’s finches, come from V. Lipphardt, “Isolates and Crosses in Human Population Genetics; or, A Contextualization of German Race Science,” Current Anthropology 53, no. S5 (2012): S69–S82.

  “The line between promoting the idea”: E. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 48.

  “by the time the Nazis assumed power”: E. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 45.

  “Dogs and horses”: E. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 134.

  “virtually dependent on one’s family chart”: B. Gausemeier, “Genealogy and Human Heredity in Germany, Late 19th and Early 20th Centuries,” 2011, available at http://wwwold.mpiwg-berlin.mpg.de/de/forschung/projects/DeptIII

  -BerndGausemeier-GenealogyAndHumanHeredity.

  “While other branches of learning”: E. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 136.

  “only one most holy human right”: Translated by Eric Ehrenreich and Daniela Diedrich. Ehrenreich showed me photographs of an Ahnenpass cover and the dedication on this inside page.

  “No one knows my unbelievably heavy sorrow”: E. Ehrenreich, The Nazi Ancestral Proof: Genealogy, Racial Science, and the Final Solution (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2007), 113.

  “You know, as a little child”: Quotes from Gisela Heidenreich in this chapter are from my interviews with her.

  “My eyes aren’t perfect”: M. Landler, “Results of Secret Nazi Breeding Program: Ordinary Folks,” New York Times, November 7, 2006.

  Chapter 5: Silence

  “We weren’t allowed to talk to each other”: Quotes from Geoff Meyer in this chapter are from my interviews with him.

  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.

  th
at 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.)