Read Online The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally - Free Book Online
Authors: Christine Kenneally
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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
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
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