We are family: Einstein, Halle Berry — and me
‘We are family,’ as Sister Sledge once sang, ‘I’ve got all my sisters with me.’ It’s a wonderful feeling, being in a family that actually works, and the humorous New York writer a. J. Jacobs seems to like it more than most.
When a complete stranger emails him: ‘I’m your eighth cousin. and we have over 80,000 relatives of yours in our database,’ he decides to expand it.
Had this mysterious person contacted Jacobs 20 years before, it would probably have come to nothing.
But Jacobs is approaching middle age, a dangerous time in anyone’s life, and particularly so if you are emotionally drawn to genealogy.
The pursuit, though, has been changed for ever by two recent developments. The internet has made it all easier. No longer do you have to go and haunt government offices to gain the birth certificate of your grandfather’s aunt’s second husband’s ex-wife. It’s all on the web somewhere.
The other big change is DNa testing, which can establish exactly where you come from, and what races you’re made up of. I haven’t done it myself, but it usually turns out that we’re all a bit of a mish-mash: a bit black, a bit white, a bit Jewish and a bit Native american, and the rest is often French.
Jacobs decides to investigate further, because that’s essentially his job. He is a writer of ‘quest’ books, wherein the writer dreams up some daft thing he wants to do and then writes a book about it.
His best known work is The Year Of Living Biblically, in which he decided to follow the tenets of the Bible for 12 obviously terrible months, not shaving, not eating certain foods, not wearing certain fabrics and so on.
It was all good fun, but it always felt like a ‘project’ that had been undertaken not for its own sake, but so he could get a book out of it.
It’s all relative, I’m happy to say, is far better. Discovering that he is related to einstein (13 steps away) and Halle Berry (24 steps), Jacobs decides he wants to get to know some of his distant relatives, and comes up with the deranged idea of putting together what he calls a Global Family reunion.
He hires a space in New York, and invites everyone he’s related to. I don’t want to
spoil it by revealing how many turn up, but his hope is that he can break the world record for the best attended family reunion, which stands at 2,585. Why? Why not?
The book becomes a surprisingly varied and interesting meditation on family and heredity, touching briefly on countless different subjects. Is it OK to marry your cousin? (It’s legal in 19 U.S. states, illegal in the others. H. G. Wells, Sergei Rachmaninoff and Edgar Allan Poe all married first cousins.)
How much DNA do we share with fruit flies? ( About 18 per cent. Slightly more worryingly, we share about 98.8 per cent of our DNA with the bonobo monkey.)
Keeping a book like this afloat takes skill. But Jacobs has a way about him. As well as being very funny, he has an immense charm, and a sort of fundamental decency. He sends emails to everyone asking them for things, and you can see why so many people say yes.
He is constantly surprised and delighted by where his explorations take him, and as a result so are we. And who does he get to sing at his Global Family Reunion other than Sister Sledge themselves?
It all makes for a lovely book, steeped in kindness and good fellowship.
As Jacobs puts it: ‘My project is all about the follies of tribalism and how we shouldn’t build unscalable walls between different cultures.
‘I do cherish some cultural identity, but I’d prefer that the partitions between cultures be low, maybe ankle height, and somewhat porous, like cheesecloth.’ I think I’d go along with that.