Humans have a natural curiosity about who they are and where they came from. Genealogy, or the study of tracing a line of descent, is the term for a wide variety of activities that lead us to clues about our ancestors. For many, genealogy is a hobby, pastime, or recreational activity they engage in on an occasional basis. The more dedicated spend countless hours combing through family religious texts, physical documents, photo albums, digital files, and DNA test results to construct a family history. Genealogy is also a profitable and lucrative business. For example, Ancestry.com claims over three million customers and one billion dollars in revenue. Historian Francesca Morgan has written a groundbreaking and thought-provoking work that addresses the politics and practice of genealogy and is the first comprehensive longue durée study of the topic in the United States.A Nation of Descendants is a “a political history of genealogists and their practices” (1). The work is divided into two parts including seven chapters with an introduction and epilogue. Part 1, Arguments about Exclusion before the 1960s,1 contains three chapters. The first chapter, “I Could Love Them, Too,” elaborates on how genealogical practices in the nineteenth and the first half of the twentieth century came to reinforce ideas of white supremacy in the United States. The Gilded Age and Victorian era saw the rise of hereditary organizations across the nation. Membership in such organizations required genealogical research to confirm lineage and most of these societies were open only to whites. In 1908, W. E. B. DuBois submitted documentation that he was eligible for membership in the Sons of the American Revolution but was denied. The American legal system likewise used ancestry to define whiteness during segregation.Chapter 2, “Yours, For the Dead” is centered around Mormon religion and its long and close relationship with genealogy. In 1840, Mormons began to baptize deceased family members by having a living member of the church stand in their place. Baptism after death allowed the soul of the deceased to proceed to one of the Kingdoms of Heaven and required documentation. The Genealogical Society of Utah was created in 1894, and in 1907 Susa Young Gates, a daughter of Bringham Young, published one of the earliest how to books on the topic, Lessons in Genealogy. Morgan argues that while Mormons followed the patriarchal and racial values of American society at the time, the ritual importance of ancestry and lineage infused a heightened desire to discover and document one’s ancestors.The final chapter in Part One, “Hereditary Greatness,” explores genealogy practices from the perspective of Native Americans, African Americans, and Jews in the United States before 1945. Native Americans had long relied on nonwritten sources to document their ancestry but began to incorporate written genealogies in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. The First Daughters of America, a Native American heredity group founded in 1930, did not require genealogical documentation but limited membership to those of Native American or white descent. African Americans seeking to trace their antebellum ancestors faced a myriad of challenges, including the legal practice of matrilineal descent, the lack of recordkeeping due to common law marriage, and the silences associated with sexual relationships between slaveholders and the enslaved. Morgan contends that limits on education, economics, social networks, and lack of leisure time also impacted the ability of many African Americans to complete their genealogies but did not stop them from working to discover and document their heritage. The mere action of pursuing the past was an act of defiance to the segregated society in which they lived. Jewish Americans also participated in the pursuit of genealogy; the Jewish American Historical Society founded in 1892 included genealogical content, and the formation of the American Jewish Archives in 1954 served to document the history of American Jews. The process of finding one’s ancestors was itself an act of agency.Part 2, Arguments about Inclusion: Spectacle and Commerce, contains four chapters that cover the period from 1945 to the present. The first two chapters focus on genealogy in America pre- and post-publication of Alex Haley’s iconic novel Roots: The Saga of an American Family in 1976. This novel and the accompanying miniseries were cultural phenomena which greatly expanded interest in the practice of genealogy. As Morgan illustrates, conditions were right for just such success. Following the end of World War II, cheaper and faster travel for research, increased genealogical holdings in libraries, decreased cost of publications, and a rise in the use of social history techniques encouraged greater attention to genealogy. The Civil Rights Movement worked to break down racial and religious barriers to finding information. The television mini-series version of Roots prompted a new generation of Americans to explore genealogy—over 36 million households watched the final night’s broadcast. In the immediate aftermath of the television event, interest in genealogy rose dramatically, especially among African Americans. The formation of groups such as the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society of America expanded access to genealogy for African Americans.The last two chapters of Part Two focus on the commodification of genealogy after 1977 and the rise of DNA as a tool for genetic identification after 1999. The popularity of Roots made genealogy profitable in the following decades and the advent of the personal computer led to the proliferation of genealogical information. Ancestry Publishing formed in 1983, offering a popular magazine and how to books, and later became a digital source for family records. Listservs and bulletin boards allowed professional and amatuer genealogists to connect and share information. Morgan argues that while this trend expanded the number of people who have access to this data, many of the genealogy sites also place information behind a paywall. By attaining copyright to private records or enhancing government data, the records became a commodity. The last chapter focuses on the use of DNA testing for genealogical purposes that began in 1999 and has greatly expanded in the past two decades, with an estimated 26 million DNA kits sold between 1999 and 2020. The popular show Who Do You Think You Are? presents an example of genealogy in popular culture; the spectacle of the reveal, Morgan contends, turns what many would like to be a private moment into a very public voyeuristic one.Overall, Morgan does an excellent job of tracing the history of genealogy in the United States over more than two centuries. Her diligent primary source work is invaluable, and her knowledge of applicable secondary sources is itself a treasure to those interested in this topic. Academic historians, genealogists, public historians, and the general public will all find this work useful. Since academic histories of genealogy are still sparse, those in an academic setting will find the approach as a political history particularly useful. The focus on gender, race, and ethnicity as they relate to the topic offers new insight into how genealogical practice evolved in the United States. Public historians often work with genealogists on a wide variety of projects, and Morgan’s work illuminates the complexities of the relationships between academics, professional genealogists, and recreational genealogists.