Not so long ago, genealogy rested contentedly on the turf of hobbyists who enjoyed trolling dusty archives and filling pedigree charts. But over the past decade, because of the rise of digitized records and cheap DNA testing, the quaint pastime has turned into a lucrative commercial industry. Genealogy companies capitalize on consumers’ seemingly boundless curiosity about their personal origins. As the industry leader Ancestry.com implores on its home page: “Join us on a journey through the story of how you became, well, you.” What country did my great-great-grandparents come from? Were they rich? Adventurous? Powerful? How did they lead to me?
Answers to these questions go beyond, say, whether you belong in the Mayflower Society, or whether you are in the male line of Genghis Khan (which, by the way, roughly 16 million men are). They can upend lives, particularly those of adoptees or descendants of slaves.
But what receives far less attention is how genealogy can reveal secrets about all of us, at once: the emergence of our species, the political history of the world, and the origins of the social structures that dictate modern life. As Christine Kenneally writes in this engrossing new book, genealogy’s boom gives us “historical transparency” as never before.
How DNA and History Shape Our Identities and Our Futures
Viking Adult. 368 pages. $27.95.Patricia Wall/The New York Times
“The Invisible History of the Human Race” is packed with stories that make this point, but one of the most intriguing comes from Ms. Kenneally’s own line. She was born in Australia, and after digging into genealogical records discovered what her grade-school self would have relished: a convict in the family. Her great-great-grandfather was sent, at age 15, from Dublin to the vast penal colony on the Australian island of Van Diemen’s Land.
Learning about her ancestor’s dark past (he had stolen a handkerchief) doesn’t shake her personal identity. But it does lead her to some profound insights about how a community keeps a secret. As the convict system wound down, in the mid-1800s, the people of Van Diemen’s Land changed the island’s name to Tasmania and stopped talking about their criminal roots. Newspapers wrote obliquely of “different regimes” or a “gloomy phase”; the word “convict” all but disappeared. Within a few generations, almost nobody in Tasmania knew that almost everybody had convict origins. For Ms. Kenneally, genealogical records revealed the truth.
DNA, too, holds myriad secrets of the past. After all, the biggest events in history — the migrations, wars and plagues — drastically influenced how people paired up and reproduced. With today’s technology, exposing this genetic legacy is astonishingly easy. For $99 or less, the three largest genetic genealogy companies — 23andMe, AncestryDNA and Family Tree DNA — will screen customers’ saliva for hundreds of thousands of genetic markers. Ms. Kenneally visits the Family Tree DNA headquarters in Houston and is stunned by its ordinariness: a generic office building with a back-room “DNA lab” containing a few noisy machines and an expensive freezer. “Once you have the right machines,” she notes, “you don’t need a lot of space or gleaming paraphernalia to uncover the mysteries of the human race.”
That last phrase may sound grandiose, but it’s accurate. These DNA markers give clues about the evolution of our species in Africa some 200,000 years ago, and about the small band of people who left around 60,000 years ago. At the beginning of that diaspora, the wandering Homo sapiens sapiens evidently had close encounters with another species, the Neanderthal, because the molecular signatures of these couplings still exist deep inside their descendants’ cells.
DNA also sheds light on more recent historical events. Native Americans’ Y chromosomes, which are carried only by men, tend to have European signatures, for example, whereas their mitochondrial DNA, passed down from mothers, does not — indicating, perhaps, that male colonists killed native men and slept with native women. Genealogy makes many people squeamish because of its associations with racism. Ms. Kenneally digs deep into the roots of the eugenicist movement and the Third Reich, and indeed finds much ugliness: segregation, forced sterilization, breeding programs.
But she also shows how the suppression of genealogy can be malign. During China’s Cultural Revolution, for example, the Red Guard would often kill families who possessed records indicating that any of their ancestors were rich or powerful. And over the last century, tens of thousands of institutionalized children across the world have been denied access to information about their families — including, sometimes, their own names.
Genealogy, like most technologies, is morally neutral; it can be deployed for evil or for good. Though the Nazis used genealogy to justify racial hierarchies, today’s scientists are using it to dispel the notion of biological race altogether. As Ms. Kenneally points out, the categories we use to talk about race — black, white, Asian, Hispanic — are in large part cultural. Genetic differences among populations don’t fit into clear-cut boundaries.
In fact, if the genome has taught us anything, it is that our DNA has far less influence on our lives than the culture we are born into. And here lies the best argument for genealogy: It unearths nature and nurture, to make our invisible histories visible, free for all to know and to judge.
No comments:
Post a Comment