The Invisible History of the Human Race (12 page)

The likelihood of Meyer’s finding his files is remote. All over the world the funds devoted to preserving records and archives are being cut. Of course, the fewer funds that are available, the more endangered are the records that do remain.

In 2012 an Australian state ombudsman revealed that his local government had committed hundreds of breaches of records-management legislation. He discovered that a single department was in possession of eighty linear kilometers of children’s home files, most of them uncataloged. Some were stored in basements with dripping water and rat infestations; others were illegally marked for destruction.

While freedom-of-information acts in most Western English-speaking countries may grant people like Geoff Meyer access to their records, information that has not been indexed can never truly be free. The care leavers suspect the governments are suppressing files to avoid being sued. Perhaps, but bureaucratic apathy achieves the same ends.

The last time I saw Meyer, he told me that he had discovered a distant cousin on his father’s side in the United States through Ancestry.com. His new cousin told him that his father had returned to the United States and died young. Later Meyer’s mother and another man also set sail for America. Their ship berthed in California, but there the trail went cold.

Meyer wondered for a long time whether he actually had a sister but never found a trace of her. He now believes the young man at the records office got the spelling of his name wrong. Meyer told me he’d had three heart attacks but he always woke up happy, thinking,
Another day!
He would keep looking for his files. What he wanted to know most of all was whether he’d been surrendered or taken. If he’d been surrendered, he reasoned, maybe the person who’d turned him in was a relative. Maybe it was a sister of his mother, maybe she had children too, and maybe he had more family. Still, he said, “I’m seventy-six. How long do I have to find out?”

 • • • 

Totalitarian power thrives when it alienates people from basic information about themselves. When European slavers abducted people from Africa, they essentially took away their history as well. It was a profoundly dehumanizing act that occurred because the system treated the individuals who were caught up in it as less than human. In Canada and Australia in the early to midtwentieth century, many indigenous children were taken from their communities and raised in settlers’ families or group homes. This act has since been described not just as abduction but as cultural genocide.

Other regimes have specifically targeted historical and family information for destruction. In 1924, when communists were in power in Mongolia, they destroyed family trees that had been kept for generations and banned indigenous surnames; for more than seventy years locals simply called one another by their forenames. In 1998 the government decreed that Mongolia’s citizens must rediscover and register their surnames and their fathers’ names. But by that point many people no longer remembered them.

In North Korea today in the
songbun
system of social organization, party and local administration officers track the ancestry of all citizens, but they don’t share that information with the country’s people, who may well have lost personal knowledge of it. A
family connection to a dissident—be it a close relative or a distant ancestor—will block a person’s access to some jobs, to education, to party membership, and even to food.

In Mao Tse-tung’s China, the leader’s view of genealogy was initially benign, until he began to feel threatened by the established power of traditional clans. Baiying Borjigin, a Beijing native of Mongolian descent, began to explore his family history at the beginning of the twenty-first century, eventually writing a book about his quest,
Searching for My Source
. As a child in Beijing, Borjigin was told that his family was descended from Borjigin Temujin, otherwise known as Genghis Khan. Indeed, Borjigin was the name of the clan into which Genghis Khan was born. Yet before he could investigate his connection to the ancient warrior, Borjigin had to deal with the
fallout from the recent dictator.

I met with Borjigin, who is now in his seventies. He told me that his family entered China many generations before he was born, and most of his Chinese ancestors were buried in a long-established family graveyard in a beautiful forest outside Beijing. The last members of his family to be buried there were his father’s parents, who contracted tuberculosis. At that time, Borjigin wrote, TB was seen as a terrifying pestilence, so his grandparents were sent to live out their last days in a residence inside the family graveyard. There they were looked after by a peasant family that was paid to maintain the cemetery. Borjigin’s father was sent to stay with relatives.

When Borjigin was six, the Chinese government reclaimed the land of his family graveyard, and his family was told to remove the bodies of its ancestors. One memorable night Borjigin watched his father and other relatives bring many strange clay-covered objects into the house. He peered from behind a door to find them washing the clay from objects made of gold and silver with emeralds and other precious materials. When he asked his father about it, he was told, “This is no business for children!”

Later Borjigin’s great-aunt took him to the public cemetery where the remains of his ancestors had been reinterred, now without their funerary treasures. She told him that it was his birthright to be the keeper of the family’s memory. “You are the first man-child of your family, and you are very obedient. Everyone else can forget our family grave, but you can’t,” she said. “You must often add some earth to our family graves when you grow up.”

But the message changed again in the mid-1960s. Like many other Chinese, Borjigin’s family was forced to turn its back on its history with the onset of Mao Tse-tung’s Cultural Revolution. By now the family fortunes were so reduced that they were regarded as urban poor, yet in the eyes of the regime their background relegated them to the “exploiting classes.”

During the Cultural Revolution, young people all over the country banded together in Red Guard groups. They harassed and terrified the citizenry, invading their houses and looking for evidence of membership in the malcontent bourgeoisie. If the Red Guard found
jai pu
(ancient family history records) or other evidence of ancestral power, they would destroy it on the spot and quite possibly kill the residents of the house as well. Borjigin’s family no longer swept its family tombs or looked after the graves, as even those behaviors were regarded as “evidence of the restoration of reactionary life.” The worship of ancestors and other old customs were forbidden. “It was very dangerous,” Borjigin explained to me through a Chinese interpreter. “Family had to destroy itself.”

Some families buried their
jai pu
,
others hid them in walls, and some destroyed them before the Red Guard could. One day, as the Red Guards searched houses down the street from Borjigin’s, his father told him to find any documents that might reveal their family history. They gathered the deed to the family graveyard and the map of its graves, which held more than forty ancestors from over ten generations. Each ancestor was accompanied by a painted portrait and a description of his or her position in the family tree. Dozens were officials in the Qing dynasty. Just one of those paintings, Borjigin knew, might lead the Red Guard to beat his entire family to death. He and his father found a large basin, and Borjigin placed all the documents inside it and burned them. His great-aunt and his father forbade him to ever mention the family graveyard or his family history again.

Borjigin was fifty years old before he was told the names of his grandparents. In 2000 he went looking for the family plots he had seen decades before. There had been a great deal of urban encroachment in the area, yet the site that Borjigin had visited as a child still looked familiar. The graveyard had, however, since been turned into a vegetable plot for the nearby university, which employed peasants to farm it. Borjigin’s companion asked the peasants if they knew the plot had once been a graveyard. They said it had been a vegetable plot as far back as they could remember, although they did often come across human bones when they were digging there.

Standing where the graves were once marked, Borjigin was sad but also embarrassed about his sentimentality. Long before his family had become wealthy and then poor again in China, they had lived and died in the deserts of Mongolia. Their bodies went into the sand where they died, and they never expected their descendants to worship them, he thought. Now his ancestors were fertilizer in this soil. “
The meals and bodies of the elite of modern China, the teachers and students of the national university, were improved. This was the best final result, wasn’t it?”

Borjigin told his father before he died that he was going to reconstruct the family tree. His father replied that he had never regretted selling their jade and antiques and paintings but that he thought every day about the family tree they had burned. “
If you can restore this list,” he told Borjigin, “I will rest peacefully when I die.”

The current Chinese government has supported its people’s reverence for their heritage. China’s largest libraries, the National Library of China and the Shanghai Library, have hundreds of thousands of family genealogies. “The clans are back in full force,” one researcher told me. “Some of them have two to three hundred thousand members and they are fairly flush with money and all about preserving the family.” Now the government doesn’t persecute people for their family graves. It charges them rent instead.

There has been a similar resurgence of interest in family history in Eastern Europe. Some researchers suggest it’s a reaction to the void left by the regimes that were overthrown in the 1990s. “They yearn to reconnect to their family, to their roots,” one observed.

Within families it is, of course, the adults who seek and manage this information. How they choose to share it with the smallest offshoots in the family tree is a private matter. Certainly the control that adults exert over the information in the lives of children can be extreme, and sometimes the regime that withholds information is not one’s government but one’s own family.

 • • • 

“Who has a convict in their family tree?” asked my eighth-grade teacher. Student after student held up a hand, testifying to their awesome convict heritage, while I sat quietly resenting them. Having not learned my lesson when I was seven about posing certain questions, I later asked my father if we had any convicts in the family. I reasoned that I had never been actually told there were
no
convicts in our line, as the question had never come up, so maybe all I had to do was ask, and it would be revealed. I was wrong. My father, who was unmoved by the teenage notion that it was now cool to be of convict stock, dismissed the idea.

It was therefore interesting a few decades later to learn that the woman who raised my father—his grandmother—was in fact the daughter of a convict. The discovery came about when I asked a local historian to help me
find my family’s origins. In a surprisingly short amount of time she led me to documents about my great-great-grandfather, Michael Deegan, about whom I had never heard a thing. The convict register in the Tasmanian Archives recorded that he was sent to Port Arthur in Van Diemen’s Land in 1842. I could hardly believe it—this was the Australian genealogical jackpot. For one small and deeply satisfying moment, I was a convict princess.

In the clean, crisp air of Tasmania today, the remains of the penitentiary at Port Arthur look more like an elegant old manor than a jail. Even though a fire rendered the main building unusable in the 1890s, the four-story goliath still dominates the scene. Standing beside a deep bay and surrounded by green hills and a forest of blue-gray gum trees, it is the largest building in a complex that includes a church, an asylum, a hospital, and a manicured garden, all surrounded by English oaks. Farther up the grassy slopes, the commandant and his colleagues lived with their families in a row of pretty Victorian houses. Out in the middle of the bay on the tip of a peninsula was Point Puer, a rehabilitation institution for younger criminals kept separate from the main group of convicts. Between the point and the main site is the Isle of the Dead, where more than 1,500 people were buried.

The black heart of Port Arthur was the Separate Prison building, where warders forswore whipping and tried to more directly manhandle the souls of their charges. When convicts arrived there, they were hooded so they could not look at or speak to another soul for all the years they were incarcerated. In the prison chapel wooden doors sealed all men off from one another. Each seat, or rather each place to stand, was a narrow, suffocating box that was constructed so the only thing the convicts could see was the preacher. Parts of the building were based on a panopticon design, which permitted a guard standing in place to survey four tiny yards where prisoners walked in a small, quiet circuit. Prisoners who misbehaved—or who were made so mentally ill they could not contain themselves—spent time even more completely isolated in a stone cell that let in almost no light, even on a bright day. Outside the Separate Prison, convicts labored in the pastoral loveliness to produce bricks, worked stone, ships, and furniture. They wore uniforms of worsted wool, of different colors depending on their status. One jacket, known as the magpie
,
was specifically designed for humiliation: Its panels, sleeves, and each side of the collar alternated black and yellow, and it made the convicts look like jesters.

Young Deegan had been transported to Van Diemen’s Land after having been arrested three times in his hometown of Dublin, at which point he was sent to Point Puer and incarcerated with boys as young as nine. When he disembarked, he was fifteen years old and five feet and three quarters of an inch tall, with hazel eyes and an inoculation mark on his left arm. He left behind two parents and a brother, and it’s likely that he never saw his family again.

When I went through Deegan’s records with a historian, she noted the surgeon’s comment about his “troublesome” conduct onboard the
Kinnear
. Boys on transport ships were at risk of rape, she said, and fending that off sometimes made them aggressive.
They were often hungry too. Yet while Australia’s convict system left a huge number of men and women so traumatized they couldn’t function, many convicts were given a chance to change their fate. “The British state invested in them by teaching literacy and skills to the young ones,” the historian told me. She looked at Deegan’s files again and pointed out that when he arrived at Point Puer he couldn’t read or write, and he only had one offense for all the time he was in jail. “See,” she said, “he learned how to be good.”