Your Roots.”

Both as an academic pursuit and as a popular American pastime, genealogy is clearly riding on a fast track.

This current acceptance has been very slow in coming about. Genealogy and derision have had a long and colorful relationship. In the Bible, Timothy warns us, “Neither give heed to fables and endless genealogies.” In The Acharnians Aristophanes poked wicked fun at sober Euripides’ fondness for reciting genealogies. The proverbial expression “to lie like a genealogist” is an old one. It appears that almost from the first moment there were genealogies—and they have been traced as far back as the Pharaohs—there have been genealogists eager to please a client or impress an audience without regard to the pesky standards of accuracy or even plausibility. In ancient Rome patricians who were descended from the founding fathers, and who were eager to maintain the rigid exclusiveness that preserved their sacra gentilica , proudly drew up genealogical tables and then had the results painted on the walls of their homes. Since almost everyone likes to be thought of as patrician, a thriving industry grew up providing plebian parvenus with busts of specious ancestors to worship and tables tracing clients back to Aeneas. It is a practice that continues in much the same form down to the present day. Probably the high-water mark of this sort of f akery is the genealogy of the Hungarian Esterhâzy family, which solemnly traced itself back to Adam’s grandfather.

Genealogy is a worldwide interest that appears in almost all cultures, but the pursuit as we know it in America usually comes to us with a pronounced English accent. The British have traditionally set great and bloody store by their ancestry. The War of the Roses and the Hundred Years’ War were but two conflicts initiated because of variant interpretations of genealogical niceties. The famous suit of Sir Richard Scrope against Sir Robert Grosvenor is a landmark case in the history of genealogical litigation. Scrope was part of an army that invaded Scotland in 1385 and he appeared on the field with his coat of arms, a gold bend on a field of blue. He was angered to find Grosvenor with the same device. His appeal to the chivalry court was considered to be of sufficient moment to be carried to the king, who decided in Scrope’s favor. Grosvenor’s claim of descendancy from one who “came over with William the Conqueror” was not the first nor would it be the last to be disallowed.

This kind of thing was exactly the sort of feudal European posturing American settlers wished to turn their backs on in the New World. They believed with Voltaire that “he who serves his country well has no need of ancestors.

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Inevitably, prominent families began to emerge; kinship, particularly in Massachusetts, counted for a great deal in the development of the great New England dynasties. Of the twelve original directors of the Massachusetts Bank, nine were related by blood or marriage. As business became more complicated, Boston’s leading families responded with a dazzling display of interlocking marriages of convenience, state, and commerce.

For all their notorious closeness, in the early nineteenth century Boston families were surprisingly liberal in reaching out beyond their own family trees to graft on promising stock. As a result, writes the historian Peter Dobbin Hall,"men of obscure origins like Nathaniel Bowditch, son of an impecunious and alcoholic Salem mariner, and Joseph Peabody, son of a rural Essex County farmer, became founding fathers of families whose names are now inevitably identified with Brahminism. ” Although family background was important in Boston, formal genealogy was less so. The Cabots and the Winthrops knew who they were and didn’t need a genealogical table to tell them.

It was different in the South in the 1830s, where antecedents were not as well established as they were in New England. Under increasing fire from Northern abolitionists over the issue of slavery, many Southerners retreated defensively into an image-saving mythology. Warmed by the extraordinarily popular Scottish border novels of Sir Walter Scott, Southerners cast about to reestablish what they took to be their Old World heritage. In some ways this was an easy task: vital records of the early Southern colonial period are skimpier than they are in the North because a large number of Southern courthouses and city halls were built of wood and had a disquieting history of burning to the ground with the records inside. While detailed records of vital statistics form the bedrock of accurate genealogical research, imprecision and discrepancy were heaven sent to those nineteenth-century seekers of illusion. Connections that would not bear the scrutiny of present-day standards were made, and Southern families could see their lineages as what they had always wished them to be: more patrician, more courtly, more settled into tradition than those swarms of immigrants in the North who were criticizing them for the “peculiar institution” of chattel slavery.

Of course, there is no evidence that the South was favored with a higher class of early settler than the North, but myths are often harder to kill than facts. This noble vision of the Old South was a strong influence on the writing of William Faulkner and other twentieth-century Southern authors whose works, according to one historian, “look back, past the South’s supposed aristocratic origins to the pre-settlement wilderness, an Eden whose native inhabitants were as unspoilt and unspoiling as the surroundings from which they drew their character. ”

The first great wave of national interest in American genealogy grew out of the 1876 Centennial celebration. This was the era of the founding of such patriotic organizations as the Colonial Dames of America and the Daughters of

the American Revolution, both founded in 1890. As they were to do a century later, these organizations took a leading role in the development of local histories and genealogical studies.

By this time a keen sense of social distinction had made itself felt. For example, members of the DAR (who number some 208,CKX) today), must trace their lineage back to people living at the time of the American Revolution, regardless of their rank or station. The Colonial Dames, with a membership of 22,000, must trace themselves back only to officers and officials of the pre-Revolution period. It is a distinction that prompted one CDA member to remark, “The DAR is the Elks Club of American historical societies.” In fact, there are three separate Colonial Dame associations. Besides the CDA there is the National Society of Colonial Dames, which is said to have broken off from the parent body over a dispute arising from certain members who traced themselves back to Benjamin Franklin through his illegitimate son, William. For whatever reasons, each group now refers to its rival as the “other Colonial Dames.” Then, to remind us all that there is always one rung on the ladder of social prestige more remote than the one we are occupying, there is also the Colonial Dames XVII Century, established in 1915, whose members trace themselves back to officials in office prior to 1699.

The sudden interest in genealogy at the time of our nation’s centennial took two separate courses. There was the beginning of solid professional genealogical research into American social history as well as a popular desire to find illustrious ancestors hiding in the family closet. All this resulted in such fervor that one historian called it “a craze that swept America in the 1880’s and 1890’s.”

On the professional side, the New York Public Library acquired the largest public collection of genealogical source materials then available. The New York Genealogical and Biographical Society was founded in 1869 and the following year began publication of a regular journal.

For the next fifty years professional genealogists turned out reams of scholarly, often little-heralded work. While many Americans were busy reassuring themselves how good their bloodlines were, genealogists were pointing out how difficult it can sometimes be to tell “good” blood from “bad.” A major genealogical study of the period—"The Tuttle Family,” published in 1883—traced the family of William Tuttle, a member of the lesser English gentry. The Turtles’ twelve children include a non compos mentis son, David; a daughter, Mercy, who murdered one of her own children; another daughter, Elizabeth, who was diagnosed as suffering from periodic dementia; and a son, Benjamin, who murdered his sister, Sarah, by hitting her on the head with an ax. Subsequent generations of Turtles produced two more children described in family records as “distracted” and “demented” and one more ax murderer. However, this troubled family tree also bore some worthy fruit. The mad Elizabeth was an ancestress of the Reverend

Jonathan Edwards, whose family has come down to us as representing all that was best in our stern Puritan heritage. The Turtle family, of whom there are now more than a half-million descendants, has gone on to make significant contributions to American culture in politics, art, industry, and religion. But the nagging thought persists that if a metaphysician of the caliber of Jonathan Edwards can find himself genetically bound to a stray lunatic only a few generations back, there is little hope for the rest of us.

Donald Lines Jacobus, one of the founders of the new generation of professionals who helped raise genealogy from pastime to science, played a vigorous role in dispelling mythology with vivid statistics. Commenting in 1930 on the American assumption that our first settlers were of “superior stock,” Jacobus found evidence of many cases of lameness, bad eyesight, and other defects among the early New England settlers. A physician’s journal of 1650 told of sporadic cases of gonorrhea and six cases of sodomy recorded in a single community. “Certain it is,” Jacobus wrote, “that this original homogeneous stock, marrying almost entirely within itself, produced in some localities within a few generations a notably fine crop of imbeciles and other defectives.”

As important as this sort of historical research may have been (and contemporary historians consider it of the utmost importance), imbeciles and defectives were not high on the American list of desired elements in a family tree. Until the middle of this century there was a great rush of clients thirsting for noble blood in their backgrounds and not very particular about how it got there. Few were as fortunate as the French general Andoche Junot, who rose from Republican beginnings to a dukedom under Napoleon and was able to remark, “I am my own ancestor.”

Americans had to go looking. The great dream was to trace a line back to the earliest settlers and then jump back across the Atlantic where the chase could be taken up again, preferably along the marble corridors of privilege. The task, legitimately undertaken, is all but impossible. It is certainly possible to trace oneself to nobility—as genealogists remind us, we are all related to Charlemagne. And it is perhaps possible to trace oneself back to early colonial settlers. But it is exceedingly difficult to be both early and noble. The hard facts were laid down by J. Gardner Bartlett, a pioneer specialist in British research. “Of the 5,000 heads of families who came between 1620 and 1640 less than 50 or not 1 percent are known to have belonged to the upper gentry of England, and less than 250 or not 5 percent can be considered as from the minor mercantile or landed gentry. No peers nor sons of peers, no baronets, nor their sons, but one knight and no sons of knights, were among the founders of New England. ”