Why Do Genealogy?

What's the point?

I estimate, conservatively, that I have spent 7900 hours of my life seeking information about insignificant dead people. Not trying to pick on them. They are insignificant in that they are not—usually—the likes of Shaka Zulu or Susan B. Anthony. Nobody is going to publish a two-volume biography about these folks, not even a paragraph. They are my family, my wife’s family, friends’ families, cousins’ families, clients’ families, and any other families that claim my passing fancy. At the risk of stating the obvious, we humans don’t live very long--take it from me, an expert in an arbitrarily-chosen sample of thousands of life spans. Why have I devoted so much of my winking existence to the pursuit of average Joes? Is this a meaningful way to spend my limited time on Earth?¹

Let’s first be clear about our definitions. When I say “doing genealogy,” I don’t mean using genealogical methods to identify the birth parents of an adoptee, or to lock up the Golden State Killer. You may quibble, but to me those quests are self-justifying. They have costs and benefits. But they bring great value to the lives of others. They bring families together, perhaps give emotional closure, maybe even prevent future crimes. My work by and large does not do those things.

What I mean by “doing genealogy” is the traditional, antiquarian stuff. It’s dusty, musty, and sometimes it even gets a little fusty. Nowadays you need the internet to do it, but even thirty years ago it would have required many hours in the reading room of a poorly-lit archive. Doesn’t have to be your own family, but it’s got to be the bread and butter.  For example, you’re figuring out the exact relationship between two people named Everton in eighteenth century Manchester, or determining the tribal affinity of a native-born matriarch in conquistador-era Guatemala. Or simply learning the names of your 3x-great grandparents. That’s genealogy. 

So what’s the point? I’m not trying to hide the ball here: I do genealogy because I enjoy it, and sometimes even when I’m not enjoying it I feel compelled ever onward by the rush of discovery. I am, in the colloquial sense, and maybe even a little bit in the medical sense, addicted. Everything else is pretext. ²

But now let’s figure out which pretext we like best.

1. Know Thyself

“You can’t know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been.”

 - Ancient African Proverb³

This one’s a classic. And it’s what I tried to get at it with my Finding Your Roots bit. The idea is that the more you know about your ancestors, that is, “where you came from,” the more you know about yourself. I’m not so sure this makes any sense, except perhaps in the most bone-thuddingly obvious of ways.

First, yes, we may well live in a deterministic universe, and there is likely no bigger determinant than our own genetic material. But there are two problems here. 

Problem A is this: if you’re trying to learn more about your own genetic predispositions and hardwiring, you probably don’t need to go much beyond your grandparents. By all means, learn about the lives of your immediate relatives, their mistakes, their triumphs. You are probably similar to those people in many ways, and you have much to gain from their stories. But once you trace back to great-grandparents and beyond, your returns rapidly diminish. And to ride out the ad absurdum, Charlemagne has absolutely nothing to tell you about yourself that wouldn’t apply equally to the rest of humanity. Say you researched the hell out of the topic, and now you know not only Charlemagne’s birth and death dates, but the identity of every little falling domino of a person between His Imperial Majesty and you. What have you learned about yourself? 

Problem B is only going to grow in significance as technology progresses. Why observe the dim echo of a subset of your genes when you can go right to the source? As we become increasingly sophisticated at interpreting the chemicals within, as complex polygenic traits become less and less an obstacle to our understanding, we will be able to read ourselves like a book. No need to read the prequels.

There is a compelling response to Problem B. Genes do not exist in a vacuum, they exist in a highly specific environment. They are raised a certain way, they encounter other beings of a certain sort, they seek to propagate themselves in a certain climate. To the extent our ancestors and relations share our environment, we can better understand how we ourselves are likely to act within it. 

That’s probably true. But it’s limited again by Problem A. Not only does our great-great grandmother share a mere ~6.25% of our DNA, but she most certainly lived in a completely different environment. Even if your family has lived on the same farmstead for the past two hundred years, and you are—against all odds—also a farmer, you deal every day with stimuli and superstimuli that she never dreamed of, with her quaint iPhone-less existence, dictated by the rhythm of the changing seasons. 

Those are the genes, then. I don’t buy it. What else can our ancestors tell us about ourselves? 

The next theory is related. You could sum it up by saying that we are the “product” of all of our ancestors. In legal terms, they are the “but for” cause of our existence. Every decision they made, action or omission they took, leads—inevitably only in retrospect—to us. To learn about those lives is to learn about the cause of our existence. 

OK. One issue is apparent immediately. The further you go back, the more we’re talking about a “butterfly effect.” It becomes less and less specific to us. Each generation we go back, our ancestors have more of an effect on the present: more descendants, generally more opportunities to flap their wings, or sneeze, or whatever ancient butterflies do to trigger hurricanes. And it’s not just our ancestors. Plausibly, in the arbitrarily-chosen year of 1500 CE, a whole lot of humans (and animals, and microorganisms, like viruses) could have snuffed out my future existence with a dirty look. 

Put simply, the universe is too complex a system for us to glean anything about ourselves from our forebears. Or, if we can, it’s one of a near-infinite array of sources for such self-knowledge, of equal coin with nearly everything else. Our own genealogy is not privileged. I may learn just as much about myself by researching the genealogy of a stranger, or the price of tea in China.

Let’s step back for a second. I am not the first person to consider the question, of course. Antiquarians have been penning apologia for their genealogical obsession at least as far back as the first American genealogy boom in the Victorian era. Before that, I would guess, genealogy was so obviously instrumental (say for proving inheritances or tribal alliances) that it required no justification. But two hundred-some years is plenty of time to generate several volumes’-worth of explanation. What did they say?

Here’s an old one, speaking directly to Pretext #1:

“To trace lineage,—to love and record the names and actions of those without whom we could never have been, who moulded and made us what we are, and whom the very greatest of us all must know to have propagated influences into his being, which must subtly but certainly act upon his whole conduct in this world—all this is implied in ancestry and the love of it, and is natural and good.”

Natural and good! I feel less weird already. That’s from genealogical pioneer Lemuel Shattuck’s epigraph to his 1855 Shattuck genealogy, taken from the Westminster Review. As befits a pioneer, as well as a man much preoccupied with other matters that the wider world might deem of greater importance (he was “the architect of American public health”), Shattuck was very interested in the purposes of family history. But it seems the best he could come up with was a variation on the “know thy ancestors to know thyself” precept, noting that he hoped to derive “philosophical and moral lessons” from his ancestors, “which may be useful in practical life.” Isn’t that what biographers say about their own work? And what about historians? Lest we forget, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it. 

I’m not here to dispute the Santayanan vindication of the study of history. Just to note genealogy has no special claim on it. Interesting though that Shattuck was writing before Mendel—almost exactly contemporaneous, really—so he’s not talking about genes, at least not strictly speaking. 

In the same volume, Shattuck admits—I think a bit sheepishly—that relentless questions about his ancestors’ lives “have arisen almost instinctively” in his mind. Now there’s something I can identify with. 

1. The Building Blocks of History

I’ve got another explanation from our distinguished predecessors. Lemuel Shattuck helped instigate the first genealogy boom. The writer Alex Haley almost single-handedly instigated the last one. In Haley’s foreword to the 1983 Ethnic Genealogy: A Research Guide, he nods at our Pretext #2:

But even more is involved than uncovering a family history, for each discovered United States family history becomes a newly revealed small piece of American history. Stated simply: a nation's history is only the selective histories of all of its people. It is only through an unfolding of the people's histories that a nation's culture can be studied in its fullest meaning.

...before immediately discarding it and getting to the good stuff: the thrill of the hunt. He even admits he has “learned to live with [his] genealogical addiction.”

But is there something to this idea? It’s immediately more plausible than Pretext #1. If you want to understand what it was like to live in America in 1776, you need to know more than the founding fathers. Our ancestors give us one access point, a useful and sensible way to narrow the millions down to a discrete set of people. From a historiological perspective it’s arbitrary, in one sense. Why your ancestors and not someone else’s? But thanks to that same quality it may offer up a representative cross-section of society, or at least of those people who had children. 

The idea is aligned with the school of “social history.” That is, to oversimplify, the study of the “little guy.” I would not be surprised if this pretext was especially popular around the same time social history took root in the universities in the 1960s and ‘70s. But of course it must have deeper roots than that, back to even to the 18th-century fad for local, antiquarian studies. 

So it is certainly a reason you could do genealogy. You could learn as much as you can about your own ancestors in order to better understand the past. You may be wise to concentrate on only a few generations, since of course our ancestors lived not just during the Jazz Age or the Ming Dynasty, but in fact occupy the entirety of biological history. If there was life on the planet Earth, there your ancestors be. 

I find myself thinking this way sometimes. If you’re interested in a given era already, it can be doubly rewarding to investigate those forebears of yours who lived through it, and to pore over the contemporaneous documentation of their lives. And if you’re like me, you may find yourself using your ancestors as historical field markers. If I’m reading a book about, say, the era of Reconstruction, I will place my ancestors in the story: when President Garfield was shot, my ancestors were here, here, and here, doing this, that, and the other. It doesn’t just teach you about your ancestors, it teaches you about their time. 

So, whether or not this object actually drives anyone to research, it’s not a bad excuse for doing so. 

1. The Forgotten Man

Call this one the Studs Terkel approach. Celebrate the uncelebrated. After the umpteenth Abraham Lincoln biography, why not say a few words about Springfield’s blacksmiths and beggars. Don’t they deserve to be remembered? What a nice thing it is to gather up the small fragments of their lives, the few that have survived the intervening years, and glue them back together, trying to make as much of a human being as you can. There may not be much. For some of our ancestors, especially the women, only a single document. But for just a little while you’re thinking of them, calling them to mind as real people who once existed for a very brief time a very long time ago.

The neuroscientist David Eagleman wrote a story about the afterlife. From memory, the idea was that even in the afterlife there are more deaths to die. The final one, when you really know you’re dead, comes the last time any living being speaks your name. I liked that story. In that possible world, I’m single-handedly keeping any number of people from permanent oblivion. Sometimes I deliberately seek out collateral lines which I know have long since died out, the shriveled, foreshortened branches of my family tree. Odds are I am the only researcher searching for them, reading their census returns, their wills. Thinking about them and saying their names. Those are the ones who really need me. We are the ones who remember the forgotten.

Someone once wrote that our ancestors deserve to be remembered. I agree on a visceral level. But why? By what right do they have any special claim on our attention? Just because they are our ancestors? Do we owe our own antecedents a special duty? Or just because they were human, and everyone deserves to be remembered? If the former, it’s not clear why exactly we owe them that favor, unless it is to pay back the debt we owe them for sponsoring our own existence. And personally, I’m only slightly less disposed to remember my great-grandmother’s brother, despite his dramatically reduced role in making me possible. And yet further, this explanation leaves us with the potentially abhorrent conclusion that the childless and descendant-less no longer deserve our thought. Those ancestors unfortunate enough to live their lives unrecorded also suffer, though that’s more a problem of the state of affairs than it is a deficiency in the argument.

OK, so maybe all humans deserve to be remembered. No way to know if this is “true,” of course. We’re unlikely to receive any divine decrees on the subject, but if we afford all humans a sacred dignity, the right to be recalled doesn’t seem a bridge too far. But what then if you want to be forgotten? Not just by Google, but by everyone, forever. Shouldn’t we have that right, too? 

How much remembering is enough? I know too many of my children’s ancestors to give all of them much thought on an annual basis? Should I celebrate all of their birthdays? And why me? Why are my cousins slacking?

These questions and more can be yours. I don’t expect to nail down the answer here, but suffice it to say Pretext #3 is full of holes. Despite that, it’s emotionally compelling. I can’t remember everyone, but remembering even one forgotten human being is unambiguously a good thing. I’m attached to this pretext notwithstanding its problems.

1. The Good Steward

Imagine we lived in a preliterate society. There are no vital records, no land records, no wills, no histories. In this society there are no genealogists. What would they do? Maybe one of the elders in your family knows the “son ofs” all the way back to the founder of the tribe. Maybe, beyond that, someone knows the brothers of that founder, and the tribes begat from them. But those people are not genealogists. They are keepers of tradition. They are the archives themselves. Their role above all else is to ensure that the knowledge survives them, and that at least one younger person knows what they know before they die.

Many humans still live in that world, in the sense that their own genealogical research relies on oral tradition. But very few of us are the keepers of oral tradition ourselves. That is to say that we are not limited by our brains. Even before the internet, we had the miracle of pen and paper and the aid of public records. 

In the age of Ancestry.com and FamilySearch, do genealogists still have some role to play as stewards of their family’s past? I would answer strongly in the affirmative, but note that the role varies depending upon the age of the family. When you travel beyond your own great-grandparents, you’re moving through the border region where private and public history meet. By the time you get a few more generations back, you’re well into history proper. Your ancestor living in Barnstable, Massachusetts in 1750 (a) is ancestral to hundreds and most likely thousands of others, spread all across the U.S. and probably the world; and (b) is tied just as much to the local history of Barnstable, and maybe even the wider history of the entire country, as they are to you, one of their many descendants, of no particular significance. I suppose you could still be the “steward” of their story, but you’re probably sharing that job with a few sixth cousins.⁴

So where does that leave us? Not stewards in the sense of holding the information in our heads, and not stewards for our ancient forebears, at least not anymore so than historians are. But we do have a special role to play. We record what is not recorded, lest it be lost forever. We bring together what is apart, like the spread of family photographs over the centuries. We organize what is overgrown and unmanageable. These are important jobs with real value, not just to the living but to the dead and the yet-unborn. But they’re not jobs for a genealogist. They are jobs for a family historian. And while the same person is often both things, they are different functions. We’ll talk about that distinction some more in a later post. 

1. The Real Answer

I’m not a detective, just a lawyer. But I love the hunt. I love going down rabbit holes. It’s energizing. At least for a little while. Then I can’t stop. And when I finally do stop I’m exhausted and a little sad. I sleep. And I do it again the next day.

That’s why I really do genealogy. I’m good at it and when I’m really sailing I’m in a flow state. Same reason people do all sorts of things, healthful and destructive. It’s out of our control, whatever does it for us. I wish I were drawn instead to brain surgery or social work. But it could be a lot worse.

1. Let’s neatly elide the obvious and impossible question as to what exactly constitutes a “meaningful” pursuit to an enterprising young mammal in a cold, rapidly expanding universe. Allow me to stipulate that it’s something that appreciably benefits the welfare of beings in the universe, including one’s own being. Yes, I know you could smuggle in all sorts of immorality under that definition. I’m a genealogist, not a philosopher. Like the man said, “modern man lacks the humility to accept the fact that the whole drama of history is enacted in a frame of meaning too large for human comprehension or management.”

2. Nothing outside the pretext!

3. I joke. Let’s just say it was Gandhi.

4. As I think through this, it’s perhaps not true for most families, only those particularly prolific examples with an outsized descendancy. When I think of one of my ancestors--say Jeremiah Poor (1719-1774) of Rowley, Mass., I may not be the only person in the world interested in his life story, but I’m very likely the only one who comes back to it again and again over my lifetime. We are a rare breed. And that’s colonial Massachusetts, a well-trodden genealogical path. I certainly have contemporaneous southern Italian ancestors of whom I am almost certainly the sole rememberer.