Read Online The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Christine Kenneally
Ads: Link
equality. Records were now for everyone, and all families being equal in the great republic, genealogy became an increasingly popular way to honor one’s family.
The more time passed after the Revolutionary War, the more people ordered registers and wall hangings that charted their families. The family tree as a symbol became popular, and female students embroidered samplers featuring them. Historical and genealogical societies began to spring up in different states, and some large families even created their own organizations, holding family reunions in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. One thousand descendants of Robert Cushman, who had organized the leasing of the
Mayflower
in England (and then sailed to Plymouth Rock on the
Fortune
a year after the
Mayflower
arrived) met in Massachusetts in 1855 and pledged to raise a monument to their august history. After an initial period of unpopularity, the Society of the Cincinnati survived to become the oldest hereditary military society in the United States.
Printers produced genealogical registers, magazines were supplemented with blank family trees, publishers printed formal genealogies of particular families, and the first “how-to” books for amateur genealogists were published. Boston even had its own genealogical magazine, and the United States began to produce even more genealogical publications than England. The most important publication in the new American genealogy was John Farmer’s
A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England
, first published in 1829, because it became the model for rigorous research. Farmer believed that mere hearsay was not sufficient to prove a family connection, and he advocated a strict adherence to evidence. He corresponded with many antiquarians and genealogists, and the growing community corrected one another’s scholarship and began a long conversation about rules of research and proof of lineage. They spoke often of the “science” of genealogy. Indeed, the sternest critics of the bad genealogy of the era were the good genealogists, like John Farmer.
One area where evidence was frequently missing was heraldry, which became more popular in the nineteenth century. For a long time the means to prove genealogical links and claim a coat of arms had resided with heraldic experts or institutions in England, who kept the new genealogy and the new genealogists subordinate to the old. But by the 1850s and 1860s, a heraldic office appeared on Broadway in New York, and American genealogists offered themselves to American families for hire. Not all of them were honest, and even at the time people grumbled about the lack of regulation. Many coats of arms were chosen on a whim from a large catalog of existing patterns or were completely fictitious.
Horatio Gates Somersby, a decorative painter by training, became enthralled by genealogy and heraldry on a trip to England and later became the first London correspondent of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He traveled throughout the country, transcribing details from formal documents, newspapers, and church records in order to build the genealogical trees of American families. He had many wealthy clients, especially in New England, and, in Weil’s account, must surely have been one of the richest genealogists for hire. Yet eventually it became clear that some of Horatio Gates Somersby’s research was fabricated.
Indeed, so prolific were his fictions that genealogists today are still being misled. In 1998—more than one hundred years after Somersby’s death—the genealogist Paul Reed remarked on a Listserv that Somersby’s “frauds have caused me headaches because people descended from lines he forged are not pleased with me for disproving the connections. They want another royal line in place of what does not exist! If the evidence originally existed, he probably would not have had to fake it.”
Somersby and his kind didn’t just change the pasts of
The more time passed after the Revolutionary War, the more people ordered registers and wall hangings that charted their families. The family tree as a symbol became popular, and female students embroidered samplers featuring them. Historical and genealogical societies began to spring up in different states, and some large families even created their own organizations, holding family reunions in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. One thousand descendants of Robert Cushman, who had organized the leasing of the
Mayflower
in England (and then sailed to Plymouth Rock on the
Fortune
a year after the
Mayflower
arrived) met in Massachusetts in 1855 and pledged to raise a monument to their august history. After an initial period of unpopularity, the Society of the Cincinnati survived to become the oldest hereditary military society in the United States.
Printers produced genealogical registers, magazines were supplemented with blank family trees, publishers printed formal genealogies of particular families, and the first “how-to” books for amateur genealogists were published. Boston even had its own genealogical magazine, and the United States began to produce even more genealogical publications than England. The most important publication in the new American genealogy was John Farmer’s
A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England
, first published in 1829, because it became the model for rigorous research. Farmer believed that mere hearsay was not sufficient to prove a family connection, and he advocated a strict adherence to evidence. He corresponded with many antiquarians and genealogists, and the growing community corrected one another’s scholarship and began a long conversation about rules of research and proof of lineage. They spoke often of the “science” of genealogy. Indeed, the sternest critics of the bad genealogy of the era were the good genealogists, like John Farmer.
One area where evidence was frequently missing was heraldry, which became more popular in the nineteenth century. For a long time the means to prove genealogical links and claim a coat of arms had resided with heraldic experts or institutions in England, who kept the new genealogy and the new genealogists subordinate to the old. But by the 1850s and 1860s, a heraldic office appeared on Broadway in New York, and American genealogists offered themselves to American families for hire. Not all of them were honest, and even at the time people grumbled about the lack of regulation. Many coats of arms were chosen on a whim from a large catalog of existing patterns or were completely fictitious.
Horatio Gates Somersby, a decorative painter by training, became enthralled by genealogy and heraldry on a trip to England and later became the first London correspondent of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He traveled throughout the country, transcribing details from formal documents, newspapers, and church records in order to build the genealogical trees of American families. He had many wealthy clients, especially in New England, and, in Weil’s account, must surely have been one of the richest genealogists for hire. Yet eventually it became clear that some of Horatio Gates Somersby’s research was fabricated.
Indeed, so prolific were his fictions that genealogists today are still being misled. In 1998—more than one hundred years after Somersby’s death—the genealogist Paul Reed remarked on a Listserv that Somersby’s “frauds have caused me headaches because people descended from lines he forged are not pleased with me for disproving the connections. They want another royal line in place of what does not exist! If the evidence originally existed, he probably would not have had to fake it.”
Somersby and his kind didn’t just change the pasts of
Similar Books
