Free The Invisible History of the Human Race by Christine Kenneally

many families; they had an enormous impact on the way the study of history is practiced today. Recall that when François Weil began to research his book he was perplexed to find no chronicles of genealogy in America and he soon uncovered the reason why. It turned out that modern-day historians’ aversion to genealogy is part of the foundation of their profession. According to Weil, the 1860s “witnessed the emergence of the first generation of professional academic historians, many of whom took pains to distinguish themselves from genealogists.”
    In the midnineteenth century there was no huge dividing line between genealogists and antiquarians. But as the cases of counterfeit lineages proliferated and as history became more established in American universities, genealogy was barred from the ivory tower. Partly this was due to its intense popularity. Dixon Ryan Fox, for example, who famously wrote about social history and the economic elite and who taught at Columbia University in the early twentieth century, thought that genealogy developed out of “snobbishness and vanity” and was unworthy of attention.
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    Truly, the more class-conscious a society is, the more likely it is that genealogy will be used against people of lower classes. For that reason, anyone who cares about equality may view genealogy with suspicion. Yet, while modern society is still affected by social class, what remains of the class system is a fossil of its former self. Dismissing genealogy on the grounds of egalitarianism today is anachronistic, and it ignores the complex emotions of the genealogical impulse. For example, throughout all American history, regardless of how many supporters or detractors genealogy had, Weil notes how often the impulse to record a family’s information was provoked by death. In 1829, after the death of his brother, “Daniel Webster, fully conscious that he was ‘the sole survivor’ of his family, began an autobiography that traced him back to the seventeenth-century colonist Thomas Webster, the ‘earliest ancestor’ of whom he possessed ‘any knowledge.’”
    The moral and religious imperatives of genealogy became ever more pronounced with time too. Ancestors were useful for the lessons they provided, good or bad. Eventually the spiritual side of genealogy became an opportunity not just for the living but for the dead as well. In 1805 Joseph Smith was born into a poor farming family in Vermont. Smith claimed that when he was fifteen, two heavenly figures appeared to him and told him that God was unhappy with the world’s Christian churches and that he must build the true Church. In 1830 Smith founded the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, also known as the Mormon Church, whose members believe that only membership in the church will save them on the final day of judgment. Lest any members worry about relatives who died before 1830 not having had the opportunity to accept the nineteenth-century teachings of Joseph Smith, the Mormon creed decrees they may retrospectively offer baptism to the departed.
    By 1880 Mormon missionaries began to travel throughout the United States to connect with other genealogical groups and transcribe records that could help establish a family connection—and thereby provide a list of possible postmortem converts. In 1894 church members founded the Genealogical Society of Utah, which then planned to build a library devoted solely to genealogical research.
    The administration of the government began to demand more record keeping as well. Land warrants and pensions for soldiers or their widows required documentation. In the absence of records, genealogical research was carried out. The first American census took place in 1790 and took account of fewer than four million people. In 1840 the sixth census required 28 clerks to record the demographic details of seventeen million people. By 1860 184 clerks were needed to count the now more than thirty million