Some Ultimate Issues in Family History

John Hallwas

I write about the pursuit of genealogy from time to time—and in fact, my first newspaper article on that topic, “Genealogy and the American Experience,” appeared 30 years ago this month (July, 1984). At that time, I was already discussing the motivations involved and asking, “Why have so many Americans become so devoted to compiling information about their family history?”

        Since then, the popularity of genealogical research has continued to increase, as article after article in newspapers and magazines has proclaimed. On May 13 of this year (2014), for example, “USA Today” carried “We’re Crazy about Our Roots” by Gregory Rodriguez, and in June, “Harper’s Magazine” published Maud Newton’s long article, “America’s Ancestry Craze.” Rodriguez refers to genealogy as “the second most popular hobby in the U.S., after gardening.” Newton asserts its popularity, too, and discusses the new trend of using DNA tests that show genealogical connection. As she says, “With the rise of these tests, secret forefathers can be uncovered and prestigious lineages can be invalidated in an instant.”  

       With Ancestry.com and other massive resources also available, and a rising focus in our time on other cultures and countries, no wonder millions of Americans are now involved in family research. In fact, it has become a billion-dollar industry. And according to polls, over 70 percent of the people in our country have at least some interest in their family background.

There is also a fascinating recent book that tracks the development of genealogy in our country: Francois Weil’s “Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America” (2013). Among the insights that Weil provides is the paradox that genealogy has flourished in a nation that had rejected the traditional focus on social standing through birth and bloodline, embracing instead the notion of individual worth based on character, talent, and achievement. But as he indicates, the relative equality of Americans, in an open society, actually prompted “a growing significance of the family as a moral, social, and political unit.” In short, family membership anchored people in a culture that was not tradition bound, so ancestral heritage still seemed important.

Nevertheless, as Weil also points out, some Americans were also anxious to claim social superiority through background. They used genealogy to assert that their ethnic group or family connections placed them above many others. As immigration increased during the nineteenth century, heredity-based societies like the Colonial Dames and the Daughters of the American Revolution arose, using genealogy to demonstrate their members’ special status—placing them in a group that was superior, in their view, to the newer people who were pouring into the country.

As this suggests, there are a variety of reasons for pursuing family history—some more laudable than others. For many, it’s simply the allure of a multi-faceted personal mystery, a slowly unraveling set of connections with a variety of surprises—involving people, places, occupations, religions, and economic circumstances.

But related to it all is the issue of identity. For the majority of genealogists, their motive is no longer to affirm status by showing descent from someone important but to realize the complex story that eventually led to their own appearance in the long chain of generations. And fortunately, this focus is prompting more people to find out, through the reading of history, what the people of a certain past culture were like, rather than to just see ancestors as names and life dates on a family tree.

Genealogy then becomes an exercise in empathetic identification with others—people who struggled with poverty, faced harsh inequality, survived wars, suffered deaths in the family, and re-located in a new and very different place when they settled in America. If the researcher is lucky enough to uncover something about a particular ancestor, beyond the name and life dates, there are probably lessons in persistence and hard work—and maybe commitment and love—that can be inspiring.

As Joseph Amato points out in “Jacob’s Well: A Case for Rethinking Family History” (2008), you can “take control of personal history” by doing genealogy. You can make sense of your family background and then relate it to your own complex selfhood. Or as Newton puts it in “America’s Ancestry Craze,”

“Beyond all that’s encoded in our 23 pairs of chromosomes—our hair, eyes, skin of a certain shade, our frame and stature . . . we are bundles of opinions and ambitions, of shortcomings and talents. The alchemy between our genes and our individuality is a mystery we keep trying to solve.”

Genealogy can also foster meaningful self-knowledge because we sometimes note the bad as well as the good behavior that ultimately led to us. As Aurora Levins Morales says in an article titled “Liberation Genealogy” for “Utne Reader” (1999), “It becomes possible to see the choices we make right now as extensions of . . . inherited ones, and to choose more courageously as a result.”

As that suggests, too, the ultimate genealogical issue is not the nature of our family roots, which are always more complex than we initially realize, but the impact that such awareness can have on us, as we develop historical-based insights into our identity and open ourselves to others, across cultural boundaries, in order to psychologically connect and grow.