Genealogy means nothing. History means everything.

This week I read an article considering the "Meaning and Meaninglessness of Genealogy" by molecular biologist Nathan Lents, Ph.D.

He has much to say, some of it great.

He absolutely understands that most genealogy is reverse engineered from pride (see my second essay). The word "pride" occurs 6 times in his piece. He effectively critiques this approach by highlighting the double standard: if we own our ancestors' accomplishments then we also own their failures. And who would want that? Apparently some. The gusto can be bizarre! (See his account of the Jesse James descendant and African-American professional genealogist on "Genealogy Roadshow"--very "awkward turtle.")

I commend Lents' enthusiasm for newly energized research in formerly ignored cultures--African American, Native American, Latin American. His claim that "underdeveloped regions usually have no paper trails to be found" will be the subject of my future writing.

However...

What he criticizes as "meaningless" is, in fact, a notion of genealogy that is literally just that--genealogy. What he considers "genealogy" is a 200 year old, sclerotic WASP obsession with pedigrees. I myself loathe this. Many of us have moved on, but it still lives. I grant him that. What does one do when discovering a famous distant relation? This other guy takes the occasion in good humor.

Sophia lacks a pure pedigree.

But it's not a prospect for me. Last summer, a grad school colleague who's LDS eagerly showed me a system that church members can use. Plug in your grandparents' info (or whomever) and, assuming that someone else has already done the legwork of linking them into a vast web of early American WASPs, it spits out a list of all your famous shirttail relatives. He asked me to give it a whirl. I balked but ultimately relented and we plugged in my grandparents' names. As I predicted: Zilch! Nada! I am 100% confident that I am 100% descended from illiterate 19th century immigrant, European, Catholic peasants who are related to no one famous. Our exercise confirmed my confidence. But one must consider the context. This is an LDS tool on a LDS website. Most Mormons have at least some early Mormon convert ancestors, which is to say, mid-19th-century WASP families from NY, OH, IL etc. From this gateway, however small, it's a fair bet that they're related to Dick Cheney, James K. Polk, Winston Churchill, Lady Di, and so forth. The system thus proves gratifying/useful to most of its constituents--which makes it a good tool. But it's not a tool for me.  

So, if we've moved on, then what has genealogy become? Family history.

And if pride isn't the best motive, or shouldn't be the only motive?

How about: growth, broadening one's perspective (see essay 2).

Genealogy vs. History

"The fact us if you go back far enough, each one of us has a shared ancestor with every other person on earth."

Exactly. Yes. True. We're genetically related to just about everyone.

Lents lobs various other shots at genealogy (e.g. irrelevance to adopted children, erroneous/forged record-keeping, vague/inconclusive record keeping, and so forth). But this numbers thing is by far his best criticism. And yet, I am unconvinced. My obsession remains. 

This "numbers" argument is a biologist's reductio ad absurdum--a deconstruction of a very particular, outmoded notion of genealogy. It is the genealogy-as-pedigree--a mathematical truism that Lents reiterates throughout his piece in different ways. 

Pucker up--like this mistletoe, writing is a parasite. While this plant feeds off the apple tree, writing siphons memory.

I can't speak for other family historians but I can say that I am definitely aware of the biological relationship of all people within "just a few thousand years." However, it is a fact that history (as such) has everything to do with writing, and the process of writing substantively (adversely) impacts memory. We have contemplated this conundrum at least since Socrates. When we speak of "historic" eras versus "prehistoric" eras it is writing which divides them. We are our memories, such as they are. Writing doesn't merely coëxist with memory but greedily encroaches upon it, parasitically sapping memory of its power. Lents observes that "Ancestry begins to lose its potency after eight or ten generations, not least of all because the records almost never go back further than that anyway." Not least of which? Exactly which. He's precisely right and I don't see what's odd about this. (But never mind that this point unwittingly undermines his claim that genealogists prize genes over culture).

"Another problem with putting so much stock in our genealogy is that this overemphasizes genetic relationships over social and cultural history."  

As Vonnegut put it, "we are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful about what we pretend to be." Cultural revivals predicated on rediscovered texts occur throughout the annals of time. Perhaps intended as revivals, these movements indeed became cultures in themselves. People reinvented their worldview in the Italian Renaissance and in Oxford Movement England. They intended to revive the glories of earlier cultures but, in fact (and often in spite of themselves), created something altogether new. The trappings of Classical antiquity in Rafael's School of Athens make perfect sense and the architectural gestures of Medieval England in Pugin's churches were not accidental atavisms but deliberate, creative re-inventions--sometimes historically imprecise. 

Indeed, authentic, sincere movements often arose from misreadings of true sources as much as they sprung from from sound readings of false or mis-identified sources (e.g. Kaballah, the "Anaphora of Hippolytus.") All of which is to say: the written, artifactual record matters A LOT. I suspect most genealogists understand this. It seems that Lents understands that genealogists understand this. Inasmuch as writing is a major means of cultural preservation, I don't understand how Lents can claim that genealogists privilege genes over culture. It's an obsolete canard. 

At the very least, family history is a matter of both genes and culture. Rarely is it genes or culture. Near the end of his piece, Lents asks whether "it [is] really necessary to know who is descended from whom?" Yes, usually.

The biological family unit (of various shapes and sizes but biological nonetheless) has constituted the normative nexus of cultural formation and transmission across many cultures, over many millennia, the world over. Insofar as this dynamic unfolds with enormous complexity, reference to the family itself serves as a convenient shorthand. Indeed, genealogy (in the biological sense) is a reasonably reliable way to study culture in microcosm--which is to say, in a representative, accurate way.

All the same, because culture is linked to memory and memory increasingly dependent on writing, I completely understand why some family historians are more interested in the "paper trail' than what oral vaguery may lie beyond it.

Family history--and indeed all history--values memory. We strive to re-record, celebrate, and parse memory wherever it be encoded--in genes, in minds, on paper.

Let us not patronize memory as idle dreaming or nostalgia. Memory is massively potent. By turns, disparities in the depth of memory create and mitigate every sort of strife. This holds true from the individual interpersonal level to the international level. Much depends on precisely when one's timeline begins, relative to one's counterpart. Dredging up distant infractions in an discussion with a partner can quickly drag everyone down into a toxic morass of mudslinging. Similarly, we can consider the various sides of geopolitical conflicts--Israel/Gaza, Ireland/Northern Ireland, U.S./Mexico border. Depending on when one starts the narrative, the narrative can take drastically different shapes. 

Some of this memory is oral, but much of it is written.

So, we must review, rehearse, reverence and prune it, maintaining it as need be.