The Invisible History of the Human Race (6 page)

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One of the most tumultuous periods in American history was, of course, the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the growing will to throw off England’s yoke and build an independent republic meant that the desire for a citizen to establish noble bona fides became less socially acceptable. As Americans began to reimagine themselves as a nation, the way they imagined their ancestry shifted too. Before and after the Revolutionary War, America’s increasingly complicated relationship with England became an increasingly complicated relationship with time and with the past in particular. This was a turning point—when genealogy in America became American genealogy. It was also when modern antigenealogy was born.

Weil documents many signs that the distaste for personal history, even for mere curiosity about one’s family, was born hand in hand with the new republic. When the Revolutionary War ended in 1783, some officers from the Continental Army formed a fellowship called the Society of the Cincinnati, named for Lucius Quinctius Cincinnatus, a Roman statesman. Like many similar groups, the society offered aid and companionship to its members. It also decreed that when a member died, his membership passed to his eldest son. By the time the society had established a chapter in each of the thirteen states, the membership rules had provoked uproar throughout the new United States, as the Cincinnati officers were accused of trying to create a new hereditary aristocracy in the new republic.

By the time Leverett Saltonstall enlisted his sister’s aid in putting together a genealogy of their family in 1815, he wrote, “
These questions are not for publick information. . . . I should be unwilling it should be generally known that I have engaged in this inquiry, because it would by many be attributed to vanity—by all who sprang from obscurity. Vanity it is not—tho’ I confess some pride, and it is a proper feeling.”

But what, really, is obscurity? Socially it is lack of status. Literally it is the absence of a record, and the thing about records is that they tend to proliferate as a matter of course around people with power: The names of property owners were recorded in legal documents, whereas early census takers did not document details about women, slaves, or native people. The records remain, even as individuals in a family disappear into the mists of time, and as time goes on, the records take on a power of their own. If there are no records, there is no power.

Yet people believed that genealogy ran counter to the beautiful idea that
“all men are created equal” and that everyone has a right to “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” Thomas Jefferson, who wrote those words in the American Declaration of Independence, noted in his 1821 autobiography that his father’s side of the family came from Wales and his mother’s side came from England and Scotland. As Weil pointed out, he also added a humble caveat: “to which let every one ascribe the faith & merit he chooses.”

Ralph Waldo Emerson, the essayist and poet, epitomized the aggressively forward-looking character of the new republic when he declared in 1836:

Our age is retrospective. It builds the sepulchres of the fathers. It writes biographies, histories, and criticism. The foregoing generations beheld God and nature face to face; we, through their eyes. Why should not we also enjoy an original relation to the universe?

Emerson’s cry to embrace the present was a call to repudiate the past. His moving meditation continued: “Why should we grope among the dry bones of the past, or put the living generation into masquerade out of its faded wardrobe? The sun shines to-day also.” A year earlier he had written somewhat less delicately, “
When I talk with a genealogist, I seem to sit up with a corpse.”

Weil describes a theater critic who wrote in 1833 that, after watching a play featuring an English baronet who was rather pleased with his own pedigree, the audience left “full of contempt for the English aristocracy, and chuckling at the thought that there are no baronets in America.” The author of
Moby Dick
, Herman Melville, whose father, Allan, was rather keen on his genealogical connections to British and Norwegian aristocracy (and whose paternal grandfather notoriously returned from the Boston Tea Party with his shoes full of tea), went out of his way to mock genealogy in his 1852 novel
Pierre; or, The Ambiguities
:

At the age of fifteen, the ambition of Charles Millthorpe was to be either an orator, or a poet; at any rate, a great genius of one sort or other. He recalled the ancestral Knight, and indignantly spurned the plow.

Critics of genealogy at the time also included foreigners who found America’s concern with aristocratic connections odd, if not ridiculous (and many of whom, no doubt, compared Americans’ distant claims to lineage with their own more intimate ties). According to Weil, many commented on the particular attachment demonstrated by the upper classes of Philadelphia and Charleston to their aristocratic heritage. One visiting English Tory exclaimed at how “
excessively aristocratical and exclusive” Americans were.

David Lambert agreed that for a few particularly influential generations, it was not so acceptable for some people to be too curious about their ancestors. One of the strangest consequences of that era, he believed, is that now he knows more about his grandmother’s parents than she ever did. “People back in the nineteenth century were very withholding of information. It was part of that mind-set to look forward instead of looking past.”

Certainly the critics were right about one thing—the more people turned to their genealogy to serve a practical purpose in their social lives, especially if it was to elevate their status, the more out of step they became with the spirit of the new nation—and the more vulnerable they became to fraud.

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As the United States expanded, the reflex against the idea that the past
must
have meaning for the present developed and spread; at its most extreme it became a belief that the past has no meaning for the present. Nevertheless, it did not quash the compulsion that many people had to look backward. In fact, the genealogical impulse grew vigorously in tandem with the antigenealogy sentiment. What was genealogy
for
if you weren’t trying to prove you were aristocratic? In the United States it became an opportunity to prove that you were American. Even as much of the actual practice of genealogy remained unchanged—the keeping of lists in Bibles or commonplace books—it slowly took on a new meaning: In some circles establishing a lineage was no longer considered a badge of superiority, but rather proof of equality. Records were now for everyone, and all families being equal in the great republic, genealogy became an increasingly popular way to honor one’s family.

The more time passed after the Revolutionary War, the more people ordered registers and wall hangings that charted their families. The family tree as a symbol became popular, and female students embroidered samplers featuring them. Historical and genealogical societies began to spring up in different states, and some large families even created their own organizations, holding family reunions in New England, Pennsylvania, and New York. One thousand descendants of Robert Cushman, who had organized the leasing of the
Mayflower
in England (and then sailed to Plymouth Rock on the
Fortune
a year after the
Mayflower
arrived) met in Massachusetts in 1855 and pledged to raise a monument to their august history. After an initial period of unpopularity, the Society of the Cincinnati survived to become the oldest hereditary military society in the United States.

Printers produced genealogical registers, magazines were supplemented with blank family trees, publishers printed formal genealogies of particular families, and the first “how-to” books for amateur genealogists were published. Boston even had its own genealogical magazine, and the United States began to produce even more genealogical publications than England. The most important publication in the new American genealogy was John Farmer’s
A Genealogical Register of the First Settlers of New England
, first published in 1829, because it became the model for rigorous research. Farmer believed that mere hearsay was not sufficient to prove a family connection, and he advocated a strict adherence to evidence. He corresponded with many antiquarians and genealogists, and the growing community corrected one another’s scholarship and began a long conversation about rules of research and proof of lineage. They spoke often of the “science” of genealogy. Indeed, the sternest critics of the bad genealogy of the era were the good genealogists, like John Farmer.

One area where evidence was frequently missing was heraldry, which became more popular in the nineteenth century. For a long time the means to prove genealogical links and claim a coat of arms had resided with heraldic experts or institutions in England, who kept the new genealogy and the new genealogists subordinate to the old. But by the 1850s and 1860s, a heraldic office appeared on Broadway in New York, and American genealogists offered themselves to American families for hire. Not all of them were honest, and even at the time people grumbled about the lack of regulation. Many coats of arms were chosen on a whim from a large catalog of existing patterns or were completely fictitious.

Horatio Gates Somersby, a decorative painter by training, became enthralled by genealogy and heraldry on a trip to England and later became the first London correspondent of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. He traveled throughout the country, transcribing details from formal documents, newspapers, and church records in order to build the genealogical trees of American families. He had many wealthy clients, especially in New England, and, in Weil’s account, must surely have been one of the richest genealogists for hire. Yet eventually it became clear that some of Horatio Gates Somersby’s research was fabricated.

Indeed, so prolific were his fictions that genealogists today are still being misled. In 1998—more than one hundred years after Somersby’s death—the genealogist Paul Reed remarked on a Listserv that Somersby’s “frauds have caused me headaches because people descended from lines he forged are not pleased with me for disproving the connections. They want another royal line in place of what does not exist! If the evidence originally existed, he probably would not have had to fake it.”

Somersby and his kind didn’t just change the pasts of many families; they had an enormous impact on the way the study of history is practiced today. Recall that when François Weil began to research his book he was perplexed to find no chronicles of genealogy in America and he soon uncovered the reason why. It turned out that modern-day historians’ aversion to genealogy is part of the foundation of their profession. According to Weil, the 1860s “
witnessed the emergence of the first generation of professional academic historians, many of whom took pains to distinguish themselves from genealogists.”

In the midnineteenth century there was no huge dividing line between genealogists and antiquarians. But as the cases of counterfeit lineages proliferated and as history became more established in American universities, genealogy was barred from the ivory tower. Partly this was due to its intense popularity. Dixon Ryan Fox, for example, who famously wrote about social history and the economic elite and who taught at Columbia University in the early twentieth century, thought that genealogy developed out of “snobbishness and vanity” and was unworthy of attention.

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Truly, the more class-conscious a society is, the more likely it is that genealogy will be used against people of lower classes. For that reason, anyone who cares about equality may view genealogy with suspicion. Yet, while modern society is still affected by social class, what remains of the class system is a fossil of its former self. Dismissing genealogy on the grounds of egalitarianism today is anachronistic, and it ignores the complex emotions of the genealogical impulse. For example, throughout all American history, regardless of how many supporters or detractors genealogy had, Weil notes how often the impulse to record a family’s information was provoked by death. In 1829, after the death of his brother, “
Daniel Webster, fully conscious that he was ‘the sole survivor’ of his family, began an autobiography that traced him back to the seventeenth-century colonist Thomas Webster, the ‘earliest ancestor’ of whom he possessed ‘any knowledge.’”

The moral and religious imperatives of genealogy became ever more pronounced with time too. Ancestors were useful for the lessons they provided, good or bad. Eventually the spiritual side of genealogy became an opportunity not just for the living but for the dead as well. In 1805 Joseph Smith was born into a poor farming family in Vermont. Smith claimed that when he was fifteen, two heavenly figures appeared to him and told him that God was unhappy with the world’s Christian churches and that he must build the true Church. In 1830 Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, whose members believe that only membership in the church will save them on the final day of judgment. Lest any members worry about relatives who died before 1830 not having had the opportunity to accept the nineteenth-century teachings of Joseph Smith, the Mormon creed decrees they may retrospectively offer baptism to the departed.

By 1880 Mormon missionaries began to travel throughout the United States to connect with other genealogical groups and transcribe records that could help establish a family connection—and thereby provide a list of possible postmortem converts. In 1894 church members founded the Genealogical Society of Utah, which then planned to build a library devoted solely to genealogical research.

The administration of the government began to demand more record keeping as well. Land warrants and pensions for soldiers or their widows required documentation. In the absence of records, genealogical research was carried out. The first American census took place in 1790 and took account of fewer than four million people. In 1840 the sixth census required 28 clerks to record the demographic details of seventeen million people. By 1860 184 clerks were needed to count the now more than thirty million people in the United States. The census recorded a citizen’s name, age, sex, color, birthplace, occupation, marital status, and value of real estate (and whether he or she was deaf, blind, or insane, among other possibilities). With this data the government essentially built a huge set of rudimentary genealogies. The 1862 Homestead Act, which inspired many Americans to apply for a free tract of land out west, generated vast amounts of information as well.