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Authors: Christine Kenneally
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father’s side of the family came from Wales and his mother’s side came from England and Scotland. As Weil pointed out, he also added a humble caveat: “to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist and poet, epitomized the aggressively forward-looking character of the new republic when he declared in 1836:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Emerson’s cry to embrace the present was a call to repudiate the past. His moving meditation continued: “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also.” A year earlier he had written somewhat less delicately, “When I talk with a genealogist, I seem to sit up with a corpse.”
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
Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist and poet, epitomized the aggressively forward-looking character of the new republic when he declared in 1836:
Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?
Emerson’s cry to embrace the present was a call to repudiate the past. His moving meditation continued: “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also.” A year earlier he had written somewhat less delicately, “When I talk with a genealogist, I seem to sit up with a corpse.”
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
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