Roots: Family and Ethnicity in the 1970s

Abstract

icans are staring wide-eyed at studies of families and ethnic groups. Professional and amateur historians reveal us every from the Mallorys of Mystic the Espys of Oysterville. Novelists produce bestselling family sagas like The Thorn Birds and Dynasty. Professional genealogists are sometimes booked for years in advance as they dig through archives for traces of our roots. Impatient amateurs, meanwhile, make their own way with the help of such recent books as Jeane E. Westin, Finding Your Roots. How Every American Can Trace His Ancestors at Home and Abroad (New York: St. Martin's, 1977) or F. Wilbur Helmbold, Tracing Your Ancestry. A Step-by-Step Guide Researching Your Family History (Birmingham: Oxmoor House, 1976). The is our cynosure. So too the ethnic group. National Book Awards go Passage Ararat, a rediscovery of Armenian nationality, and World of Our Fathers, a history of East European Jews in New York City. Although Webster's continues define ethnic as heathen, Americans now take pride in their ethnicity. Congress has appropriated millions of dollars for the Ethnic Heritage Studies Program, whose purpose is to encourage greater understanding of the ethnic backgrounds and roots of all American citizens. Ethnicity, like family, depends on genealogy; and the bookstores carry wares like Charles L. Blockson and Ron Fry, Black Genealogy (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1977) and Dan Rottenberg, Finding Our Fathers: A Guidebook Jewish Genealogy (New York: Random House, 1977). Not even the illiterate can escape the manifestations of this interest in and ethnicity. Television confronts them with Roots (a book