A Nation of Descendants

Politics and the Practice of Genealogy in U.S. History

Francesca Morgan

• Publisher: The University of North Carolina Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664798
• Topic: Storia
• Subtopic: Storia nordamericana

From family trees written in early American bibles to birther conspiracy theories, genealogy has always mattered in the United States, whether for taking stock of kin when organizing a family reunion or drawing on membership—by blood or other means—to claim rights to land, inheritances, and more. And since the advent of DNA kits that purportedly trace genealogical relations through genetics, millions of people have used them to learn about their medical histories, biological parentage, and ethnic background. A Nation of Descendants traces Americans' fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries. Francesca Morgan examines how specific groups throughout history grappled with finding and recording their forebears, focusing on Anglo-American white, Mormon, African American, Jewish, and Native American people. Morgan also describes how individuals and researchers use genealogy for personal and scholarly purposes, and she explores how local businesspeople, companies like Ancestry.com, and Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s Finding Your Roots series powered the commercialization and commodification of genealogy.

Part I

Arguments about Exclusion before the 1960s

Chapter One

I Could Love Them, Too

Genealogy Practices and White Supremacy

Nearly a century after Tocqueville’s sojourn to the United States in the 1830s, foreign visitors in the early twentieth century were quick to discern genealogy practices’ usefulness to Americans’ social pretensions and to the maintenance of power relations in the United States. In 1904, prominent German sociologist Max Weber (1864–1920) became sure that affection for aristocratic tropes was increasing rather than decreasing in America. He toured the United States for three months with his wife Marianne. The couple crossed multiple boundaries, social as well as geographical. Their destinations included Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee, Alabama, and settlement houses in Chicago and Buffalo’s poor immigrant neighborhoods. The Webers also paused outside Medford, Massachusetts, to visit some of Max’s maternal kin. His half cousin Laura (Fallenstein) lived there with her husband Otto von Klock and their eight children. Klock ran a typing and translation business, and he also hired himself out as a genealogist, reportedly garnering “commissions from the Astors and other established and wealthy families to conduct genealogical research.”1 Klock’s ability to use both German and English aided his catering to the successful.

Max and Marianne then returned home to Heidelberg, where Max polished the draft of what became The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, published the next year (1905). He also began to incubate theories that America was undergoing “Europeanization.” Europeanization’s most obvious meaning was increasing bureaucratization and the growing power of the state.2 Another signifier of America’s Europeanization “had to do with the intrusion of status-seeking norms of social honor, the ‘aristocratic’ pretensions of the plutocracy” in the United States, in another echo of European histories. His cousin-in-law’s clients helped inspire that formulation. Weber called out some U.S. hereditary organizations, family associations, and catchphrases—“‘F. F. V., or First Families of Virginia,’ or the actual or alleged descendants of the ‘Indian Princess’ Pocahontas, of the Pilgrim fathers, or of the Knickerbockers,” shorthand for ruling families of old New York. Each of these represented “almost inaccessible sects and all sorts of circles setting themselves apart.”3

Weber’s perceptions of increasing stratification in the United States, expressed in the development of hereditary organizations, articulate American genealogists’ status-seeking in the late nineteenth century. White genealogists’ practices became ever more explicitly racist and hereditarian. Narrowing definitions of American belonging, along the lines of inheritance, documentation, and whiteness, increased genealogy’s prestige, and therefore genealogy’s popularity. In part because of the dropping costs of printing and publishing, the number of published family genealogies in the United States jumped from an estimated 339 in 1868 to a total of 3,795 in 1909, or a nearly ninefold increase, as registered by the Library of Congress.4 Family genealogies focused on only one family, one surname, or small, interrelated groups of families or surnames. Acts of documenting and publishing signified upward social mobility and high social status on the part of both ancestors who were easy to document, and descendants who were able to devote time and money to genealogy.

Affection for genealogy drove Americans to make the most of new technologies and institutions. Genealogy activity even brought some facilities into being. The creation of newspaper genealogy features and large libraries, both of which expanded access to materials on which genealogists depended, suggests a preexisting interest in genealogy even as they increased genealogy’s popularity in turn. The late nineteenth century featured the development and elaboration of public libraries throughout the United States; the launching of larger research libraries such as the New York Public Library’s federation (1895) and Chicago’s Newberry Library (1887); and the proliferation of newspaper features, which the Boston Transcript pioneered. The emergence of these institutions belongs to a larger picture in which the American bourgeoisie in American cities brought all kinds of cultural institutions into being, from symphonies to opera houses to art museums to universities, with the intent of rivaling Europe’s.5 But the Newberry Library’s founding figures purchased many genealogy publications for their brand-new collection, built de novo from bare ground, also because they anticipated patron requests for those materials.6

A newspaper that Boston’s upper classes favored, the Transcript published readers’ genealogy queries as early as the 1830s.7 Genealogy became a regularly scheduled offering of the Transcript in 1876, in response to reader demand. Such features appeared weekly by 1894, and twice a week by 1901.8 Newspaper features for genealogists typically combined information exchanges—readers’ queries about particular research problems, for other readers to address—and points of advice from more experienced genealogists. The historian Katharina Hering has counted at least seventeen major newspapers that had regular genealogy features between the 1870s and 1940s, including the Atlanta Constitution and the New York Mail and Express. My own count of major newspapers with genealogy features adds at least two more, the Newport (R. I.) Mercury, as of 1899, and the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Deseret News (Salt Lake City), as of 1907.9

Research facilities appeared in many parts of the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Denver’s public library expanded its genealogy offerings after it became clear that illustrious patrons, such as the wife of New Mexico’s territorial governor, were traveling considerable distances to obtain the proof that they needed for their applications to the Daughters of the American Revolution (DAR) (1890) and the other new hereditary organizations of the era.10 By the mid-1920s, other urban public libraries with collections and services for genealogists included those in Los Angeles; St. Louis, Missouri; and Chattanooga, Tennessee.11 These examples from the West and South show the spread of genealogy-friendly institutions well outside Northeastern cities and New England diasporas in the Upper Midwest.

Genealogy practice was not racial on its face, since research could challenge a family’s whiteness as much as certify it. However, the insistence on documentation embedded in Victorian genealogy practices otherwise placed these practices in Jim Crow’s arsenals. State laws that imposed racial segregation, suppressed voting by people of color, and allowed the sterilization of incarcerated populations without their consent all depended on genealogical record-keeping. So did federal laws that eroded Native American tribal sovereignty and landholding and that restricted or banned immigration.12 Private entities, such as hereditary organizations, also used genealogy to stiffen social distinctions. In all these cases, scrutiny of family histories set Americans apart from each other on the basis of race. Important to note, “European” did not yet equal “white.” Gilded Age genealogy aficionados attributed racial supremacy to descendants of Protestants from northwestern Europe and Scandinavia, especially but not exclusively from the British Isles.13 In the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, racially delineated genealogy practices spread across boundaries of region, denomination, ethnicity, gender, and class that would otherwise have continued to divide white Protestants from each other.

Continuity and Change since Antebellum Times: Inherited Identities for Contemporary Anglo-Saxons

Late nineteenth-century genealogy practices that stressed inheritance of identity, insisted on documentation, and prized Anglo-American whiteness possessed lengthy roots. But the concept of Americanness as an inherited, racial, and documented status was contested enough before the Civil War to put genealogy aficionados on the defensive and to keep their numbers small. “The study of genealogy will never become a popular pursuit,” the attorney William Whiting predicted in 1853 when serving as president of the New England Historic Genealogical Society (NEHGS), founded eight years beforehand. Whiting ascribed that organization’s small numbers to widespread objections among “unreflecting minds” that “the study of genealogy is uninteresting and useless . . . that it makes no difference to us who our ancestors were, or what were their peculiarities of mental or physical constitution—that the value and respectability of every one depends upon his personal merits—that in this country, if not elsewhere, there are no hereditary rights which render a knowledge of one’s ancestry either necessary or desirable.” Whiting went on to dismantle each of these objections at length. But he did not challenge his own prediction that genealogy would never become popular.14 Just months after his speech, the NEHGS closed its “rooms” for at least four months because of a shortage of funds.15

However, definitions of Americanness as racial and inherited had begun to spread as a result of the U.S. war on Mexico (1846–48) and mass immigration. Famine in Ireland and the failed revolution of 1848 in the German states caused mass exoduses to the United States. Population flows from Europe now included significant numbers of Catholics and Jews. The term “Anglo-Saxon” had long indicated populations and languages in antique and early medieval England that many Britons and Americans regarded as ancestral. But “Anglo-Saxon” now also indicated contemporary white Anglo-American Protestant populations, with some inclusion of descendants of Pennsylvania Germans, Dutch, and other non-British nationalities who had lived in colonial British America.16 Star...