The Invisible History of the Human Race Read online

  Weil describes a theater critic who wrote in 1833 that, after watching a play featuring an English baronet who was rather pleased with his own pedigree, the audience left “full of contempt for the English aristocracy, and chuckling at the thought that there are no baronets in America.” The author of Moby Dick, Herman Melville, whose father, Allan, was rather keen on his genealogical connections to British and Norwegian aristocracy (and whose paternal grandfather notoriously returned from the Boston Tea Party with his shoes full of tea), went out of his way to mock genealogy in his 1852 novel Pierre; or, The Ambiguities:

  At the age of fifteen, the ambition of Charles Millthorpe was to be either an orator, or a poet; at any rate, a great genius of one sort or other. He recalled the ancestral Knight, and indignantly spurned the plow.

  Critics of genealogy at the time also included foreigners who found America’s concern with aristocratic connections odd, if not ridiculous (and many of whom, no doubt, compared Americans’ distant claims to lineage with their own more intimate ties). According to Weil, many commented on the particular attachment demonstrated by the upper classes of Philadelphia and Charleston to their aristocratic heritage. One visiting English Tory exclaimed at how “excessively aristocratical and exclusive” Americans were.

  David Lambert agreed that for a few particularly influential generations, it was not so acceptable for some people to be too curious about their ancestors. One of the strangest consequences of that era, he believed, is that now he knows more about his grandmother’s parents than she ever did. “People back in the nineteenth century were very withholding of information. It was part of that mind-set to look forward instead of looking past.”

  Certainly the critics were right about one thing—the more people turned to their genealogy to serve a practical purpose in their social lives, especially if it was to elevate their status, the more out of step they became with the spirit of the new nation—and the more vulnerable they became to fraud.

  • • •

  As the United States expanded, the reflex against the idea that the past must have meaning for the present developed and spread; at its most extreme it became a belief that the past has no meaning for the present. Nevertheless, it did not quash the compulsion that many people had to look backward. In fact, the genealogical impulse grew vigorously in tandem with the antigenealogy sentiment. What was genealogy for if you weren’t trying to prove you were aristocratic? In the United States it became an opportunity to prove that you were American. Even as much of the actual practice of genealogy remained unchanged—the keeping of lists in Bibles or commonplace books—it slowly took on a new meaning: In some circles establishing a lineage was no longer considered a badge of superiority, but rather proof of equality. Records were now for everyone, and all families being equal in the great republic, genealogy became an increasingly popular way to honor one’s family.

  The more time passed after the Revolutionary War, the more people ordered registers and wall hangings that charted their families. The family tree as a symbol became popular, and female students embroidered samplers featuring them. Historical and genealogical societies began to spring up in different states, and some large families even created their own organizations, holding family reunions in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. One thousand descendants of Robert Cushman, who had organized the leasing of the Mayflower in England (and then sailed to Plymouth Rock on the Fortune a year after the Mayflower arrived) met in Massachusetts in 1855 and pledged to raise a monument to their august history. After an initial period of unpopularity, the Society of the Cincinnati survived to become the oldest hereditary military society in the United States.

  Printers produced genealogical registers, magazines were supplemented with blank family trees, publishers printed formal genealogies of particular families, and the first “how-to” books for amateur genealogists were published. Boston even had its own genealogical magazine, and the United States began to produce even more genealogical publications than England. The most important publication in the new American genealogy was John Farmer’s A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England, first published in 1829, because it became the model for rigorous research. Farmer believed that mere hearsay was not sufficient to prove a family connection, and he advocated a strict adherence to evidence. He corresponded with many antiquarians and genealogists, and the growing community corrected one another’s scholarship and began a long conversation about rules of research and proof of lineage. They spoke often of the “science” of genealogy. Indeed, the sternest critics of the bad genealogy of the era were the good genealogists, like John Farmer.

  One area where evidence was frequently missing was heraldry, which became more popular in the nineteenth century. For a long time the means to prove genealogical links and claim a coat of arms had resided with heraldic experts or institutions in England, who kept the new genealogy and the new genealogists subordinate to the old. But by the 1850s and 1860s, a heraldic office appeared on Broadway in New York, and American genealogists offered themselves to American families for hire. Not all of them were honest, and even at the time people grumbled about the lack of regulation. Many coats of arms were chosen on a whim from a large catalog of existing patterns or were completely fictitious.

  Horatio Gates Somersby, a decorative painter by training, became enthralled by genealogy and heraldry on a trip to England and later became the first London correspondent of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He traveled throughout the country, transcribing details from formal documents, newspapers, and church records in order to build the genealogical trees of American families. He had many wealthy clients, especially in New England, and, in Weil’s account, must surely have been one of the richest genealogists for hire. Yet eventually it became clear that some of Horatio Gates Somersby’s research was fabricated.

  Indeed, so prolific were his fictions that genealogists today are still being misled. In 1998—more than one hundred years after Somersby’s death—the genealogist Paul Reed remarked on a Listserv that Somersby’s “frauds have caused me headaches because people descended from lines he forged are not pleased with me for disproving the connections. They want another royal line in place of what does not exist! If the evidence originally existed, he probably would not have had to fake it.”

  Somersby and his kind didn’t just change the pasts of many families; they had an enormous impact on the way the study of history is practiced today. Recall that when François Weil began to research his book he was perplexed to find no chronicles of genealogy in America and he soon uncovered the reason why. It turned out that modern-day historians’ aversion to genealogy is part of the foundation of their profession. According to Weil, the 1860s “witnessed the emergence of the first generation of professional academic historians, many of whom took pains to distinguish themselves from genealogists.”

  In the midnineteenth century there was no huge dividing line between genealogists and antiquarians. But as the cases of counterfeit lineages proliferated and as history became more established in American universities, genealogy was barred from the ivory tower. Partly this was due to its intense popularity. Dixon Ryan Fox, for example, who famously wrote about social history and the economic elite and who taught at Columbia University in the early twentieth century, thought that genealogy developed out of “snobbishness and vanity” and was unworthy of attention.

  • • •

  Truly, the more class-conscious a society is, the more likely it is that genealogy will be used against people of lower classes. For that reason, anyone who cares about equality may view genealogy with suspicion. Yet, while modern society is still affected by social class, what remains of the class system is a fossil of its former self. Dismissing genealogy on the grounds of egalitarianism today is anachronistic, and it ignores the complex emotions of the genealogical impulse. For example, throughout all American history, regardless of how many supporters or detract
ors genealogy had, Weil notes how often the impulse to record a family’s information was provoked by death. In 1829, after the death of his brother, “Daniel Webster, fully conscious that he was ‘the sole survivor’ of his family, began an autobiography that traced him back to the seventeenth-century colonist Thomas Webster, the ‘earliest ancestor’ of whom he possessed ‘any knowledge.’”

  The moral and religious imperatives of genealogy became ever more pronounced with time too. Ancestors were useful for the lessons they provided, good or bad. Eventually the spiritual side of genealogy became an opportunity not just for the living but for the dead as well. In 1805 Joseph Smith was born into a poor farming family in Vermont. Smith claimed that when he was fifteen, two heavenly figures appeared to him and told him that God was unhappy with the world’s Christian churches and that he must build the true Church. In 1830 Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, whose members believe that only membership in the church will save them on the final day of judgment. Lest any members worry about relatives who died before 1830 not having had the opportunity to accept the nineteenth-century teachings of Joseph Smith, the Mormon creed decrees they may retrospectively offer baptism to the departed.

  By 1880 Mormon missionaries began to travel throughout the United States to connect with other genealogical groups and transcribe records that could help establish a family connection—and thereby provide a list of possible postmortem converts. In 1894 church members founded the Genealogical Society of Utah, which then planned to build a library devoted solely to genealogical research.

  The administration of the government began to demand more record keeping as well. Land warrants and pensions for soldiers or their widows required documentation. In the absence of records, genealogical research was carried out. The first American census took place in 1790 and took account of fewer than four million people. In 1840 the sixth census required 28 clerks to record the demographic details of seventeen million people. By 1860 184 clerks were needed to count the now more than thirty million people in the United States. The census recorded a citizen’s name, age, sex, color, birthplace, occupation, marital status, and value of real estate (and whether he or she was deaf, blind, or insane, among other possibilities). With this data the government essentially built a huge set of rudimentary genealogies. The 1862 Homestead Act, which inspired many Americans to apply for a free tract of land out west, generated vast amounts of information as well.

  Yet as many of the nation’s people began to leave thicker and thicker trails of records, one group had to deal with the fact that all their historical information had been stolen.

  Slaves had been brought to America with nothing more than their memories, and after several generations the descendants of those slaves had little chance of confidently tracing the origins of their ancestors. Once in America, however, the lives of African Americans began to be documented, including by deeds of sale; court records; birth, marriage, and other parish records; and military and census data. In contrast to the genealogical curiosity of Americans of northern European descent, it wasn’t until late in the twentieth century that African Americans began to study their heritage. A key moment was the publication of Roots by Alex Haley in 1976. Allegedly based on a true story, the book was an international success and ignited a passion for personal history in the communities of many minorities, as well as reviving mainstream interest in genealogy.

  As it turned out, some of the material in Roots has since been disproved, from inaccuracies about the accounts of many characters’ lives in Africa (if not their actual existence) to the claim that all African Americans were descended only from slaves. (Just before the Civil War, one in eight black Americans was free.) Still, even if Haley’s own claim that he was America’s foremost expert on black genealogy has been challenged, Roots was a hugely significant book that enlivened history once more for an enormous number of people who had been shut out of it.

  • • •

  Before the twentieth century most documentation concerning heredity was either a personal aid to memory or concerned with legal matters. But in the early twentieth century genealogy became much more connected to biology. It’s hard now for us to think of the two as separable, but connecting them was a process of discovery that involved many different minds in many different fields. As scientific ideas were developed about what was passed down, how it was passed down, and what it meant about who we were, they were inevitably shaped by our historical understanding of what is passed down. Thus the initial insights of scientific genealogy reflected the attitudes of the day, like the notion that poverty, talent, and goodness were inherent and—long before anyone began to worry about genetic determinism—the idea that some groups of people were inherently superior to others.

  Chapter 3

  The Worst Idea in History

  We must, if we are to be consistent, and if we’re to have a real pedigree herd, mate the best of our men with the best of our women as often as possible, and the inferior men with the inferior women as seldom as possible, and bring up only the offspring of the best.

  —Plato, Republic

  It started with sheep. In the mideighteenth century Robert Bakewell, a gentleman farmer from Dishley Grange, Leicestershire, had a particular talent for noticing what got passed down from a parent to its offspring, and how. For instance, Bakewell realized that specific traits were often linked with families and that the contribution of both ram and ewe had an impact on their offspring. He learned that not only could specific traits be passed down, but sometimes an entire group of traits seemed to be linked, so that the presence of one predicted another. An innocent mark on a sheep’s face, for example, might signal that it also had a much more significant trait.

  Bakewell began to experimentally breed his sheep and he became skilled at selecting for different traits. Until this point farmers had mostly used an animal’s ancestry as a guide to its breeding potential. But Bakewell realized that an individual animal should be evaluated for its own particular set of traits and then methodically bred—or not bred—accordingly. Part of his genius was a knack for amplifying good traits while controlling for bad ones.

  At first in secrecy and then to great public acclaim and popularity, Bakewell created a new breed of sheep. Called the Dishley sheep, it had fine bones, fattened up fast, and possessed a strange but wonderful barrel-shaped body whose most valuable parts were larger (while the parts with no market value were smaller).

  For generations before Bakewell farmers had bred their sheep for valuable qualities, and with experience they began to develop practical rules for the process. Even though they did not understand that parents pass on specific traits to offspring, they had long recognized that one animal could be of more value than another and that the best animals had great currency in trade and war. The basic rule of thumb, which had been around since the time of the Greeks, was “like begets like” (still a reasonable guide today). But even though their experiences had enabled farmers to formulate reliable axioms for producing good stock, they did not create any new breeds. At the time, they didn’t conceive of the process of selection and reproduction of stock over generations as “heredity”; rather, they envisioned it as a holistic process and spoke about the way sires might “leave an impression” or make a “stamp” on offspring.

  The understanding of reproduction at the time was still heavily influenced by the Bible’s version: Humans are “fashioned to be flesh . . . , being compacted in blood, of the seed of man.” Some farmers believed that traits were passed down by blood, and some thought that particles in the blood collected in the testicles and were somehow turned into seed. The basic idea was that beings were not reproduced; they were created. Therefore an individual animal was shaped by its ancestry but also by the weather, its food, or even its dreams. The most delicate moment in the creation of an animal was the moment of its conception. Even what the mother was looking at whe
n the animal was conceived could shape it.

  For a long time farmers believed that the health of stock was so closely connected to its environment that if you moved it from place to place, it would degenerate and its value would suffer. It was thought as well that males and females made different contributions to the creation of a new being. Some theorists attributed most of the creative power to the egg (which was woken up by the sperm) or, more typically, to the sperm, which planted the stuff of life in the egg. Bakewell’s experiments made it clear that the female was as important as the male when it came to breeding.

  In 1783 Bakewell founded an association to regulate the leasing of the Dishley to other farmers for breeding. It was the first time that a farmer systematically leased stock based on its breed (and charged revolutionary prices for the privilege). Bakewell’s experiments soon gave rise to a large collective activity, and the combined genius—and stock—of his neighbors and, later, of most of sheep-breeding society changed what we know about the way that traits move through generations.

  Bakewell became known as the “Prince of Breeders,” and his Dishley sheep made their way throughout England and on to Europe and America, eventually being bred in Australia and New Zealand as well. By 1790 one of his contemporaries made the modern-sounding observation that Bakewell’s experiments showed that “a number of traits were found, in some considerable degree at least, to be hereditary.” That principle didn’t apply only to sheep, as Bakewell also bred cattle and horses that became extremely popular with other breeders. Before his experiments farmers spoke of characteristics that remained “constant” and true” over generations; afterward “inheritance” became accepted as a fundamental mechanism. In 1915, more than a hundred years after his death, the Breeder’s Gazette, the most widely read breeding publication in the world, wrote: