The Genealogical Sublime

Julia Creet

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN:
  9781625344809
  9781625344793
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613767238
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Since the early 2000s, genealogy has become a lucrative business, an accelerating online industry, a massive data mining project, and fodder for reality television. But the fact remains that our contemporary fascination with family history cannot be understood independently of the powerful technological tools that aid and abet in the search for traces of blood, belonging, and difference.

In The Genealogical Sublime, Julia Creet traces the histories of the largest, longest-running, most lucrative, and most rapidly growing genealogical databases to delineate a broader history of the industry. As each unique case study reveals, new database and DNA technologies enable an obsessive completeness—the desire to gather all of the world's genealogical records in the interests of life beyond death. Archival research and firsthand interviews with Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints officials, key industry players (including Ancestry.com founders and Family Search executives), and professional and amateur family historians round out this timely and essential study.

Chapter 1

Confucius

The Oldest Genealogy in the World

To help us understand the mathematical and moral dimensions of the genealogical sublime expressed as descent, pedigree, and inheritance, we will start with a brief chapter on the oldest genealogy in the world. The longest recorded family tree in the world belongs to the Chinese philosopher Confucius (Kong Fuzi, “Master Kong,” 551–479 BC), recorded through eighty-three generations, father to son.1 Confucius helped usher in ancestor veneration toward the end of the Zhou dynasty (1122–256 BC), about the same time as Taoism. A government official who exercised a philosophy of “soft power” during a time of violent cultural upheaval, Confucius dedicated himself to a lifetime of scholarship and teaching, as well as mastery of the warrior arts. Confucius is credited with teaching his disciples the cultivation of personal virtue, parental veneration, erudition, loyalty, kindness, and adherence to custom and ritual. This code of ethical behavior and familial loyalty and responsibility became the moral guidance of Chinese culture for two thousand years, resembling many of the same teachings as Christianity.

The Analects of Confucius, “Edited Conversations,” is a collection of aphorisms and ideas attributed Confucius and his contemporaries, mostly likely compiled and written by his followers. One of the central principles is ren, an outward expression of inward ideals, virtue expressed as altruism, particularly toward one’s family—parents, children, and siblings. The Way or the Tao of humanness is through one’s interactions with one’s closest family and honored ethical figures. Qingjie James Wang argues that the Confucian conception of the self is a “genealogical self,” a self established only in relation, that is, relation to one’s family and also in relation to figures who “point out to us different ways towards morality and true self.”2 Confucius became over time both an honored ancestor and a family member to a vast and growing number of descendants.

Originally tallied by hand, the first printed version of the Confucius Genealogy was produced in AD 1080 in the Northern Song dynasty. By the twentieth century, in twenty-five hundred years, the Confucius pedigree had been revised only four times. After the first modern revision in 1937, the list of Confucius’s descendants included six hundred thousand members, strictly organized as a descendant chart, read from top to bottom.3 No trees here. This vertical, descending structure is the same as the medieval genealogical schemas. “All harbour,” as Christiane Klapisch-Zuber writes in the “Genesis of the Family Tree,” “the implicit metaphor of a stream of blood, of wealth, of values—flowing from the same source situated on high, down to a group of individuals placed much lower.”4

In China ancestor worship is a kind of defused religion. In the West we think of genealogy as a mainly secular pursuit (aside from the Mormon doctrinal imperatives). For the Chinese, ancestors are part of a cosmology of both the living and the dead, secular since it is rooted in the family, and supernatural, imbued with metaphysical thinking. While in many genealogical origin myths gods gave birth to humans, for Chinese who still worship ancestors, gods were once humans and humans can still become gods. Deities and the dead live in otherworldly realms and are accessible through spirit mediums and other forms of communication. According to the Chinese Spiritual Life Survey carried out in 2007, almost 70 percent of Chinese practice one form or another of ancestor worship.5 The three most common forms are visiting the grave sites of ancestors, honoring ancestral tablets kept at home or in an ancestral hall, and updating the family genealogy. Of the three, the continuation of the genealogy is the least practiced, but, in all cases, males with medium to high income status are in the majority of worshippers. Anning Hu summarizes the results of the survey: “Almost all kinds of ancestor worship activities in China are organized by male family members (usually the eldest ones) . . . a finding that is not surprising in light of the patrilineal nature of family life in China.”6

The early sinologists of the nineteenth century split Chinese religious practices into two dichotomous strands: the practices of the literate elite who followed the three teachings of Confucianism, Buddhism, and Taoism and the folk practices of ancestor worship followed by the majority. All advocate filial piety as a form of reverence that unites kin groups in reciprocal obligations between the living and the dead. Confucianism also formed the basis of Chinese schooling and entry exams for the imperial bureaucracy for two millennia, until the late nineteenth century, when the conservatism of Confucian culture was blamed for Chinese weakness in the face of the innovative developments of the West. The most revered of these lines and kinship groups were the descendants of Confucius himself. From the beginning of the Ming dynasty in the fourteenth century, descendants of Confucius received official titles and honors from the central government. These privileges were revoked only after the overthrow of the Qing dynasty in 1911.

Though it should have been updated every thirty years, Confucius’s genealogy was aggressively interrupted when the Communist Party took power in 1949. The party banned ancestor worship and other Confucian rituals as “feudal practices,” teaching party loyalty instead. That onslaught was renewed during the 1966–76 Cultural Revolution when Confucius, or Kong Fuzi, was reviled by Chairman Mao as a “stinking corpse.” Mao ordered his Red Guards to destroy the rich history of Confucian artifacts as symbols of feudal oppression and to persecute his ancestors as the embodiment of that hierarchy. Confucius was swept aside as part of Mao’s order to destroy the “four olds”—old ideas, old customs, old habits, and old culture. But in the 1980s, as China began to pursue a more capitalist model of prosperity, the reintroduction of Confucius proved useful as a buffer against Western values. As historian Francis Fukuyama wrote in the Financial Times, “The government has permitted, and even encouraged, this revival of Confucianism in order to provide a justification for a modern, authoritarian China that does not depend on western theories of history.”7 Along with the revival of Confucianism came the resurrection of Confucius himself—and, most important for the purposes of this case history, his genealogy.

In 1998 Kong Deyong, a seventy-seventh-generation descendant living in Hong Kong, established the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee to complete a fifth revision of the tree. More than 450 branches were set up around the world to assist in the work. The twenty-first-century family tree update was approved by eighty-seven-year-old Kung Te-cheng, Chairman Deyong’s cousin, living in Taiwan, who inherited the millennium-old title of Yan Sheng Gong (Lord of the Saint Blood). Emperor Renzong (1022–63) of the Northern Song dynasty (960–1127) bestowed the title of “Lord of the Saint’s Blood” on the head of the philosopher’s forty-sixth-generation descendants, and the title passed along with the blood.

Ironically, Confucius himself was probably illegitimate. His father, a warlord named Shu Liang He, and his mother, a member of the Yan clan, “came roughly together,” indicating either a rape, concubinage, or some other sort of extramarital encounter.8 He would not turn out to be a family man, either, leaving his wife, son, and daughter to pursue his politics and writing. Nonetheless a human god of sorts, to the first in Confucius’s male line came reverence, property, and prestige. But in 2003, a remarkable departure from tradition indicated that the revision of Confucius’s genealogy was tied to larger social contexts: Kong Kaiping became the first woman to have her name included in the Confucius Genealogy, breaking almost three millennia of primogenitor genealogy of the revered philosopher.9 Women in general are rare in Chinese genealogy, a mentality and tradition derived from Confucianism itself. But, says Kong, the eighty-third descendant of Confucius who heads the compilation committee, “The project is about promoting the legacy of the great man rather than the patriarchal clan system of the family.”10 The current revision marked a major break from the past in several respects. For the first time, the genealogy included women, ethnic minorities, converts to Islam, 34,000 descendants from fifty-fourth-generation heirs who arrived on the Korean peninsula at the end of the Yuan dynasty (1279–1368), 900 recovered relatives in Taiwan, and two branches in Shanxi and Henan Provinces that had been “lost” for more than a thousand years.

At eighty volumes, the fifth edition added more than 1.3 million new entries before registrations were suspended, though Kong Dewei, the Confucius descendant who directing the updating work, estimated that there were close to 3 million descendants in total, many of whom had been lost to broken links over time, migrations, and political divisions. Living descendants had to pay five yuan (seventy U.S. cents) to be included. The dead were added for free if their families could prove their pedigree. As the Chinese English-language newspaper Jinan reported, with a whiff of irony, “He’s been dead for 2,500 years but his family just keeps growing and growing—Confucius, or more properly his descendants, are alive and well and flourishing in China and across the globe, according to the latest version of his family tree which is set to triple the size of his kith and kin.”11

The rehabilitation of Confucius at home in China was also exported by the Chinese government in an exercise of “soft power,” a philosophy descended from Confucius himself. Suffering from an image crisis abroad for the repression of human rights, encouraging industrial globalization with low-wage workers, exporting cheap and cheaply made products, environmental disregard, political and economic corruption, and a general sense of shift in power from the West to the East, China embarked on a cultural offensive, establishing, beginning in 2004, Confucius Institutes worldwide to promote Chinese languages and culture. Similar to his genealogy, the institutes represented both a revival of traditional culture and a branding exercise, as the Chinese government distanced itself from the policies of the Cultural Revolution and Mao.

The registration of new members in the genealogy was finished by the end of 2007. Published in 2009 to mark the 2,560th anniversary of his birth, at forty-five thousand pages, in eighty volumes, Confucius’s updated family tree now acknowledged more than 2 million verified members. By 2014 the eighty volumes had been fully digitized—fitting on a thumb drive—to make revision, searching, and verification easier. The digital version was tree shaped and searchable, providing analytical functions for demographic and other statistical information.12

In the example of Confucius’s family, we see the immediate difference between the idea of genealogy and that of family. They are inextricably linked, to be sure, but genealogy traces strict ideas of useful kinship, while family often doesn’t choose its bedmates. The demarcation of genealogical relationships represents a slightly more abstract exercise than sitting down to a family fight or fond photographs hanging on the wall. The narrative need for the resurrection of the Confucian genealogy is part of a rehabilitation more largely of his teachings cultivating fraternity, loyalty, filial piety, integrity, and harmony. However, its other inheritances, a strict adherence to feudal culture primogeniture lines and a patriarchal system that did not tolerate intellectual and cultural differences, have been subdued. In the name of “boosting world harmony,” the Confucian line now represents the continuity of his figure and a rewriting of a liberal or neo-Confucianism in the body of his descendants, a sign of the loosening grip of communist repression, and resistance against Western values.

That the women who bore each successive eighty-three generations of baby Kongs have not until now been part of the genealogy points to how absolute the difference between family and genealogy can be. In every major system—Confucian, Jewish, Christian, surname groups, and so on—inheritance is a masculine affair, and women are ancillary, a conception of lineage that the democratization of genealogy has manifestly challenged and changed. So, let us make this observation, which may be obvious, but bears stating: pedigree is a very confined notion of descent, one that locates it absolutely in religion and culture. Genealogy, in this sense, is less about family than it is about an inherited status. Yet blood, the bio, is the matter on which the strict legality of pedigree rests. We are dealing with a concept that is, as with most things human, both physical and cultural, natural and constructed, essential and easily manipulated—in other words, endogenous and entrained. For my purposes, the genealogy of Confucius himself (rather than Confucianism, but still as its manifestation) provides a framing story for some of the issues of the book as a whole: descent, moral and family values, emergent technologies, and the genealogical sublime.

Too Much Proof

Sometimes proof is the enemy of genealogy. As this brief history of the resurrection of Confucius line reveals, genealogy is manifestly a social practice embedded in political—broadly speaking—demands of the moment. And though practices of tracing pedigrees are grounded in biological inheritance, genealogy and genetics are not necessarily the same thing. As we will see later in the book, the popularity of genetic genealogy is gaining significant momentum in the West, where the popularity of genealogy in general has skyrocketed in the past twenty years; genetic genealogy in China is less compelling yet growing for different reasons. Whereas genetic genealogy in the West focuses in large part on percentages of ethnic inheritance and finding immediate family (often revealing “nonpaternity incidents”), in contrast, in China, where ancestor worship has a twenty-five-hundred-year tradition and 90 percent of the population is Han Chinese, the appeal is linked primarily to discovering links to royalty rather than ethnic roots.13 But the case of Confucius sheds some light on a resistance to DNA determinism.

Even as the Confucius Genealogy Compilation Committee threw open the doors of the family compound to those who had never been counted before, the process of verification was limited to paper genealogies. The committee was reticent to have the lines confirmed via DNA testing, since the point was not to prove that the sage’s blood flowed in his descendants but, rather, to encourage his values. Biological verification would have compromised the cultural project in myriad ways: it might have revealed historically broken bloodlines, it might have disqualified contemporary applicants, and it might have relied on questionable science, given that finding a DNA sample of Confucius was unlikely. Biological verification would have run counter to the idea of the project in the first place, which was to revive the memory of Confucius and to embrace his values as both ancient and modern. The more people who considered themselves related to Confucius, the larger the number of likely adherents. Investing in ancestral identity is to also invest in the attributes of one’s ancestors, much as eschewing one’s lineage is a way of distancing oneself from the values of preceding generations.14 In the case of the Confucian line, cultural values and identification were closely aligned. In this case, as Jane Qui observed, “the project hints at the limits of Chinese engagement with the age of genomics, and demonstrates how high cultural stakes can constrain science.”15

In 2002 Deng Yajun, a professional medical examiner of the public security bureau in Xi’an, Shaanxi Province, became one of the first DNA paternity experts at the Centre of Forensic Sciences and Beijing Genomics Institute. Given her expertise in paternity testing, and backed by the Genomics Institute, Deng proposed that she could use DNA testing to help establish a genetic database of authentic Confucius descendants. “Theoretically, all true Confucian male descendants should have the same genetic information in their Y-chromosomes despite small mutations,” Deng said.

Resisting Deng’s interest, the compilation committee eschewed DNA testing, since the proposed DNA proof misunderstood the purpose of the reestablishment of the Confucian family pedigree. “We are tracing a cultural linkage instead of a biological one,” Kong said. “In addition, the process to re-establish the Confucian family pedigree is to collect lost historical evidence and facts, and the DNA testing has nothing to do with this mission,” added Kong, claiming that few people involved in the pedigree revision, including the mostly proven Confucian descendants, had contac...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Notes
• Index