François Weil. Family Trees: A History of Genealogy in America.

Abstract

In his introduction, François Weil describes Family Trees as a “genealogy of genealogy” that divides research on American ancestors and family relationships into four configurations. The first, lasting from the initial European migration until the mid-eighteenth century, was a quest for social status in the British imperial Atlantic community. The second, coinciding with the birth of the new republic and the antebellum period, emphasized genealogy as an egalitarian, moral, and familial concern. The third, extending from 1860 to the middle of the twentieth century, represented a quest for racial purity, nativism, and nationalism. The fourth, fueled by the civil rights movement and aided by the Internet, continues to this day and deals with ethnicity and the impact of DNA testing. Weil minces no words in his astute examination of each period. Colonial genealogists, exercising unsupervised and profuse use of heraldic devices and coats of arms, saw themselves as transplanted provincial gentry. This approach may have come to a head when Thomas Jefferson asked a fellow Virginian on a visit to England to acquire “a coat of arms,” saying that it could be “purchased as cheap as any other coat” (p. 27). By contrast, other Americans had to rely on oral transmission, which, ironically, may have been more reliable. Mary, a slave in eighteenth-century Maryland, “knew that she was descended ‘from Negro Mary imported many years ago in this country from Madagascar’” (p. 30). With the founding of the United States in the 1780s, however, researching one's lineage became a matter of curiosity and remembrance—usually dominated by women. This led to the production in 1829 of A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England by John Farmer of New Hampshire and the first genealogical journal, the New England Historical and Genealogical Register, established in 1847. These efforts were coupled with landownership cases that hinged on genealogical research whose task was “not a goal but the means to obtain a result” (p. 105). With the coming of the Civil War, new attitudes on race and the law of heredity put Anglo-Saxons again “at the top of the racial scale” (p. 114)—this time with no holds barred. When the “aging” American genealogist John Fiske was invited to speak at the unveiling of a statue of Alfred the Great, he identified himself as “a lineal descendant of Alfred” (p. 119).