The Invisible History of the Human Race Read online

  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?

  Chapter 2

  The History of Family History

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

  —Wisdom of Sirach 44:1

  For 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 Ma
jor 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.

  • • •

  One of the most tumultuous periods in American history was, of course, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the growing will to throw off England’s yoke and build an independent republic meant that the desire for a citizen to establish noble bona fides became less socially acceptable. As Americans began to reimagine themselves as a nation, the way they imagined their ancestry shifted too. Before and after the Revolutionary War, America’s increasingly complicated relationship with England became an increasingly complicated relationship with time and with the past in particular. This was a turning point—when genealogy in America became American genealogy. It was also when modern antigenealogy was born.

  Weil documents many signs that the distaste for personal history, even for mere curiosity about one’s family, was born hand in hand with the new republic. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, some officers from the Continental Army formed a fellowship called the Society of the Cincinnati, named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman statesman. Like many similar groups, the society offered aid and companionship to its members. It also decreed that when a member died, his membership passed to his eldest son. By the time the society had established a chapter in each of the thirteen states, the membership rules had provoked uproar throughout the new United States, as the Cincinnati officers were accused of trying to create a new hereditary aristocracy in the new republic.

  By the time Leverett Saltonstall enlisted his sister’s aid in putting together a genealogy of their family in 1815, he wrote, “These questions are not for publick information. . . . I should be unwilling it should be generally known that I have engaged in this inquiry, because it would by many be attributed to vanity—by all who sprang from obscurity. Vanity it is not—tho
’ I confess some pride, and it is a proper feeling.”

  But what, really, is obscurity? Socially it is lack of status. Literally it is the absence of a record, and the thing about records is that they tend to proliferate as a matter of course around people with power: The names of property owners were recorded in legal documents, whereas early census takers did not document details about women, slaves, or native people. The records remain, even as individuals in a family disappear into the mists of time, and as time goes on, the records take on a power of their own. If there are no records, there is no power.

  Yet people believed that genealogy ran counter to the beautiful idea that “all men are created equal” and that everyone has a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words in the American Declaration of Independence, noted in his 1821 autobiography that his father’s side of the family came from Wales and his mother’s side came from England and Scotland. As Weil pointed out, he also added a humble caveat: “to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses.”

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist and poet, epitomized the aggressively forward-looking character of the new republic when he declared in 1836:

  Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

  Emerson’s cry to embrace the present was a call to repudiate the past. His moving meditation continued: “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also.” A year earlier he had written somewhat less delicately, “When I talk with a genealogist, I seem to sit up with a corpse.”