The Invisible History of the Human Race (4 page)

Once again we have the question of why having knowledge of remote ancestors and a shared history makes us “proud.” Is it that preening ourselves before the glass of history seems less egotistical than inspecting our images in the glass of fashion?

Lewontin’s dismissal is unmistakable, and yet by the same argument we probably shouldn’t feel any satisfaction when our favorite football team wins a game. Usually we do, though, and perhaps genealogy is no more complicated than that—the impulse to cheer on the home team, even if most of the team is dead. At any rate, if it’s not appropriate to have feelings about belonging to a group that is genetically or historically connected, where should the cutoff be? Can we be proud of our grandparents? By Lewontin’s measure, no, because we have had no influence over their actions. But the same would go for much of our parents’ lives too. There’s something nihilistic about asking,
Why should we feel proud?
The implied question is
Why should we feel anything?
Well, why not?

Around the same time that Lewontin’s essay was published, obituaries announced the death of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who was born in 1925 in Aiken, South Carolina. In 2003 Washington-Williams announced at a press conference that she was the illegitimate daughter of Strom Thurmond, a white American congressman, and Carrie Butler, an African American teen who worked as a maid in the Thurmond household. By the time Washington-Williams was in her early twenties, Thurmond was governor of South Carolina. Later he became a long-standing senator in the U.S. Congress and at one time ran for the office of U.S. president. A strict segregationist, he said: “
All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.”

Washington-Williams waited until Thurmond died before she publicly revealed that he was her father. “My children deserve the right to know from whom, where and what they have come,” she said. “I am committed in teaching them and helping them to learn about their past. It is their right to know and understand the rich history of their ancestry, black and white.” Washington-Williams was a mother of four, a grandmother of thirteen, and a great-grandmother of four by the time she wrote her memoir in 2005. It’s hard to imagine her descendants feeling nothing as they think about her past.

When she finished her historic announcement, the elegant and assured Washington-Williams spoke of the “great sense of peace” that came over her when she decided to share the details of her family’s history. For some, no doubt for many, the details of their own lineage, and certainly that of others, may be banal. But when those details are lost or suppressed, they can take on an enormous power.

 • • • 

Perhaps neither question—
Why should we feel proud?
or
Why shouldn’t we feel proud?
—can take us far. But it is surely interesting to ask,
Why
do
we feel proud?
because quite clearly many people do. Even Lewontin allows that all cultures in every era have been interested in ancestry. Were they motivated by pride, sorrow, amusement, or curiosity? It’s surprisingly hard to answer this question.

Wendy Roth, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, says that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be a genealogist when she grew up: “
I was always the family record keeper.” But Roth’s family was Jewish, and because of the disruptions of World War II they didn’t know much about earlier generations. “There is a sense that other people can do genealogy, but for us the records are gone,” Roth explained. “I have one friendship with a woman in England who traced her family back to the 1500s and I’ve always lived a little vicariously through her.”

Once, when Roth was backpacking in Europe, she visited Rymanów, Poland, the town that had been home to one of her great-grandfathers. The only traces of the Jewish community that once lived there were the ruins of a synagogue. Roth met a man who must have been in his eighties, and they communicated in a traveler’s mix of drawing and impromptu sign language. She told him she wanted to find the old Jewish cemetery, and he led her up a steep hillside. “It was hard for me to keep up with him,” she recalled. “He was so spry.” They reached an area of chest-high weeds where the cemetery had been, and he mimed to her that he was a small child during the war. “He acted out that in this cemetery the Nazis had come, and they had lined up Jews, and then opened fire on all of them, and then they took the gravestones and used them to pave a road.” Roth’s guide then pointed to the road the Nazis had built, which lay beneath them, down the hill.

To feel that she finally stood somewhere that her ancestors had stood was an extraordinary experience for Roth. About fifteen years later, she and her husband traveled to Švencionys, Lithuania, where, she believed, a great-great-grandfather must have lived. There had once been a vibrant Jewish community there. Unusually, the Jewish cemetery was still intact: “We were crawling around again, it was totally overgrown, lots of stones fallen over but mostly in one piece.” They had a translator with them to help find the gravestones for the family, including one for Roth’s great-great-grandfather. When Roth saw it, she realized that it also held the name of her great-great-great-grandfather. It was the first time she had learned his name.

It was “unbelievable,” she said. “Absolutely unbelievable. I was in tears.” Why was this encounter so emotional? “It’s a feeling of breaking through a wall. Of the frustration of wanting to know more about your family and your past and what people’s lives were like, and where they came from, and who they were, and what their personal stories were, and feeling like you’re never going to be able to uncover that. Once you have that feeling of that great mystery, any piece of information feels like a treasure trove. Whether it’s a name or a place where somebody once was, it’s a form of a connection that you thought you were never going to have.”

Roth interviewed many people who traced their family histories (see more on this in chapter 12), and she was always struck by the difficulty they had explaining what exactly compelled them. “With avid genealogists and especially genetic genealogists, I try to get at the question of why they are interested,” she said. “What is amazing to me is that people can’t articulate it. It’s like it is such a basic urge or a basic primal interest that they have a really hard time putting it into words. Some people try, and they’ll give you answers that sound a little clichéd. They’ll talk about wanting to find their own place in history, or wanting to know where they came from, or they’ll talk about it making history more interesting to them, but the level of commitment of a lot of people means to me that it must go deeper than that.”

I came across Wendy Roth when I started looking for general studies of genealogy. Someone, I reasoned, must have investigated the psychology of family history or, surely, examined how different philosophies of heredity have shaped this ubiquitous human experience. I asked genealogists, geneticists, historians, and others whose work invoked in some way questions of inheritance and history, but none could point me to a body of work on which he or she relied.

Apart from Roth, a few scholars have investigated the topic, but usually only briefly and in isolation. This seemed odd. After all, historians acknowledge that attitudes and even feelings are passed down culturally. Economists study the way socioeconomic status, especially poverty, is reproduced. Psychologists, social scientists, and even English professors recognize that the family is a powerful engine of inheritance. Most scholars of human behavior accept that individuals are shaped in some way by the people who raised them and that even a family unit may possess a character. Yet there was apparently no field that brought together all these ideas about inheritance.

 • • • 

Like Roth, I became my own family’s historian. But even though the fragments of past generations I glimpsed struck me as wondrous, I did not dig down for a long time. When I did begin to look further into my family’s past, I experienced a strange array of emotions, including relief and contentment, but there was despair too.

I found myself drawn to one ancestor and then another, and sometimes a single detail was all it took for me to feel, at least for a little while, that I had a relationship with them. The day I realized that I could learn about Julia Dillon, my father’s great-grandmother, was a revelation to me. She was one of my sixteen great-grandparents, and I had heard her name many times but knew nothing about her. I couldn’t explain why I had never thought about her as an actual person who left physical traces in time.

I found her name on a ship’s register and was stunned to learn that in 1862 she brought her four children by herself from Ireland to Australia on a ship called the
Lightning
. At the time I had two small children of my own, and I did everything in my power to avoid taking them with me to the supermarket, where they made a trip through the dairy section feel like
The
Odyssey
. How did Julia manage her children on that long voyage?

Once she arrived in Australia, Julia reunited with her husband, Daniel, who had arrived on an earlier voyage. The family lived for a while on the goldfields of rural Victoria, and Julia had five more children. Like so many families of that era, Julia’s lost children along the way. Jeremiah died at fifteen of a fever. Johanna died at eighteen while she was in service in a small country town. I found the browned, crisp transcript of the inquest into her death in the state archives. She had been complaining of pain and was sent to bed. Her employer, Elizabeth Farrell, later checked on her. “I found her very hot and racked with pain,” she said. “I proposed to give her a mustard plaster.” The doctor was summoned and he gave her a dose of medicine and then ordered another dose. “Ought the medicine make her as sick?” wondered Farrell. They left poor Johanna alone, and later Farrell climbed the stairs to look in on her. For a minute she thought she was asleep, but Johanna was gone. “I found her dead,” Farrell said. She then called out to the manager that “Johanna was dead in the bed.”

Despite the resilience that characterized most of Julia’s life, the hardship of her days flattened me. Once, while I was attending a conference in the United States, I woke at 5:00 a.m. with jet lag after covering in a day approximately the same distance that it took Julia forty days to cross. I told a genealogist at the conference that the thought of her hardships made me sad.

“But you can be impressed by her!” the genealogist replied, and I was.

I began to shake the malaise when it occurred to me one day that even though I had all sorts of complicated feelings about Julia, I had no idea what she would have thought of me. Who was I to her? Merely one of her son’s many granddaughters. Here is the brutal asymmetry of a big family
and
time. Julia sits at a node in our family tree from which many, many branches sprout. I, on the other hand, am a twig. Even if she were alive, I’m not sure I would mean much to her.

Later I found a photo of Julia. She was about seventy at the time, and it was hard to tell if she was just small in stature or shrunken by age. She wore a frilly black dress and a black bonnet, which was secured under her neck with white flowers arrayed at the front. Her eyelids dragged down at their corners. I suspected the photo had been taken to commemorate a death in the family. Did her eyes, light and inscrutable, reflect sorrow? Was it exhaustion? I still don’t know what it means to have a relationship with her, but that was, without a doubt, my father’s nose on her face.

 • • • 

How do we personally lose or find information about our lineage? Our tendency is to assume that whatever we don’t know about ourselves or our families has simply fallen away naturally, through attrition over time. Certainly, memory has absolute limits, but there are psychological forces at work too.

In 2012 Jordi Quoidbach, Daniel Gilbert, and a colleague wrote about an experiment they had carried out where people in different age groups were asked about either what they had liked, valued, or prioritized ten years earlier or how much they thought their current preferences were likely to change over the next ten years. The scientists found that their subjects were pretty good at assessing how much they had changed in the previous ten years, which was always a considerable amount. By contrast, the participants in the study always underestimated how much they were likely to change in the next ten years. In fact, they didn’t think they were going to change much at all.

According to Quoidbach and his colleagues, people have a tendency to think of the present as a “watershed moment at which they have finally become the person they will be for the rest of their lives.” The researchers dubbed the phenomenon the “end of history illusion,” and they showed that it applied to personality traits, core values, and even best friends. Quoidbach found that the older people got, the less pronounced the illusion was, yet even the oldest subjects believed they had finally become the person they would be for the rest of their lives. “History,” wrote the researchers, “is always ending today.”

Perhaps the end-of-history illusion also applies to the way people think about generational time. We live in a temporal envelope. For most of us the horizon extends forward maybe two generations and back just two or three. It is hard to break out of the mind-set that we stand at a crucial center point of that span and that all the people who came before were merely precursors to us. It isn’t until you populate the family tree out that it becomes clear how brief a human life is, how soon it is over, and how
you
only play a bit part in a story line that expands out and contracts back and goes off in directions that no one can predict or control.

People who dig into their lineage may find it a startling corrective to the feeling that they exist at the apogee of an arc, one that has been heading inexorably toward them and that only gracefully declines away from them. Or maybe people delve into their past because they have started to lose their “presentism” for other reasons. It is telling that the most common triggers for a genealogical quest are major life events, such as the death of a parent or a grandparent or the birth of a child or grandchild, events that typically cause people to stop and consider the more existential questions:
Where do I come from? Where do I go from here? What is my legacy?