Books & Digital Picks
This month’s family history inspiration
JULIA CREET
University of Massachusetts Press, 176 pages, £27.50
Julia Creet’s university profile describes this “crossover academic/ trade book” as tracing “the cultural, historical and corporate histories of the longest, largest, and most profitable genealogy databases in the world”.
In it Creet ponders the collision between the “genealogical zeitgeist”, the rise of large-scale databases fed by usergenerated content, and her own “profoundly personal” genealogical journey into her origins, coining a new term – the genealogical sublime – to describe the totalising scale and ambition of the genetic and archival genealogy industry.
At the core of the book are interesting histories of the Mormon Church, Ancestry and other bodies, backed up by decade- old interviews with key executives.
But central to the sublimity argument is the growth of DNA testing. A genetic test is now established as the first step for new researchers, and with most male DNA samples in the USA now turning up at least one third- cousin match, public databases of test results have evolved a new life as tools for solving crimes.
A work that dissects the cultural significance of the growth of genealogy is needed, but Creet’s imports assumptions rather than unpacking them. “Without an origin story” do we really “suffer a form of existential lack or absence”? And do we do genealogy to “complete” ourselves by “resolving our anxieties about our place on the family tree of man”?
In truth, we find whatever connection we look for. DNA can give us specific information, but it won’t map to race, which is a social construct, or map to nationality, which is a political one. And while we’re all related, and ultimately descend from a single man and a single woman, most of those who came before us have no living descendants and still remain silent and unknown.
Chris Pomery is a writer and historian, and author of Family History in the Genes: Trace Your DNA and Grow Your Family Tree
‘DNA won’t map to race, or map to nationality’