Life Writing in the Long Run: A Smith & Watson Autobiography Studies Reader

The “How” of Doing Genealogy

The methods of genealogy need to be described in some detail, as the high seriousness of the enterprise and its remarkable resources are not well known to non-practitioners. One is published by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormon Church), which regularly updates its United States Research Outline as a “how-to” for laymen. It presents genealogy as a compilation and consolidation of kinds of evidence, asserting:[8] “The term genealogy is used in this outline and in the FHLC (Family History Library Catalog) to describe a variety of records containing family information previously gathered by other researchers, societies, or archives. These records can include pedigree charts, compiled data on families, correspondence, ancestor lists, research exchange files, record abstracts, and collections of original or copied documents” (USRO 21). The purpose of doing genealogical work, then, is to verify an established past. It is impermissible to add or invent; rather, the project is to discover historical connections and bring the record together for future generations. A personal story is subordinated to the history of the family, and that story tolerates no embroidery. For the genealogist, the introduction of a personal perspective would undermine the validity of history.

Genealogy requires expertise in research methodology and the use of many kinds of historical documents. The USRO refers to levels of expertise—beginning, intermediate, and proficient—in handling resources. The casual researcher wondering about charting her family history discovers an entire section in the bookstore or library of how-to’s, a labyrinth of documentary sources, and official bibles of various societies detailing their authorized methods. Extensive bibliographies, many organized by ethnicity, others by place, kind of archive, or source, can provide information. There are pages of guides and reference books on ancestry and much to be learned—about summaries, immigration and refugee settlements, organizing a family tree, and so forth.

And that is only the beginning. The United States has extensive archival resources. The National Archives and Records Administration in Washington, D.C. has regional branches in every state. Their holdings, complemented by those of state offices, include vital statistics, offices of town and county records, and other private archives. Libraries include the major holdings of the Library of Congress, the Newberry Library, the New York Public Library, the National Society of the Daughters of the American Revolution, the New England Historical and Genealogical Society, and others. There are more than nine thousand historical and genealogical societies, two of the largest and most influential of which are the American Society of Genealogists and the National Genealogical Society (USRO 45). Major journals published in this field include American Genealogist, Genealogical Journal, National Genealogical Society Quarterly, and several regional journals. Among archives, the Family History Library of the Church of Latter-day Saints towers, literally and figuratively. Its new facility, opened in Salt Lake City in 1985, now serves more than three thousand researchers daily and is being greatly enlarged to accommodate more who make pilgrimages to use its holdings, which are vast and comprehensive and include a wealth of technological equipment, such as microfilm, CD-ROM, and digital networks, to manage access to millions of pages of sources.[9] The unwary beginner may be overwhelmed by the elaborateness of the genealogical apparatus, though “user-friendly” computers stand ready to assist. For those who cannot travel to the Family History Library, the church has more than fifteen hundred centers for family history throughout the United States and the world.

The researcher can also use many kinds of civil records, including birth records, marriage certificates and registrations, divorce decrees, and death records, and religious records on baptism, marriage, and death. Censuses—federal, state, and local—are available since statehood, as early as 1790, but are not entirely accurate because they often do not list slaves, women, or children by name, do not itemize household information until 1850 (SYA 205), and involve personal reporting. Census records may be unreliable, the USRO advises, because of incorrect information (11). At several points, invisible human agents threaten genealogical ordering.

The genealogical research process is straightforward and ordered to minimize human intervention. Users are advised that personal judgments are inappropriate. Documents should be gathered and discussed with a member of the family who clearly remembers the family’s history; copies assembled of the records for birth, marriage, and death for the family within the United States; religious documentation and cemetery records checked; immigration and naturalization information sought. The genealogical researcher may also consult federal census and military records and review documents such as the passenger lists of ships, city telephone directories, and obituaries (SYA 211). In this welter of documents, the researcher is invariably advised to maintain disinterested objectivity and to validate the accuracy of all evidence.

Doane and Bell, in Searching for Your Ancestors, explore another side of genealogy, namely, how doing research “remakes” the genealogist as someone who can assume several roles: tactician, detective, archaeologist, psychologist. Objectivity is crucial; personal connection to the “object” of study, those who can talk back, hold back, or, worst of all, distort and fantasize, is discouraged. The researcher must be committed to detection, to uncovering plain fact by using good timing and relentless curiosity. The sources of investigation are vulnerable to forgetfulness and mortality. Indeed, an archaeological discourse of recovery characterizes much genealogical discourse: “In digging for ancestors, no stone is too small or too insignificant to be left unturned” (55).[10] The genealogist also needs to develop psychological skill and tact with older relatives who have trouble remembering or focusing. The guide recommends mnemonic strategies that can elicit familial data while evacuating its personal content, the residue of autobiographical contamination. Researchers are urged to develop a set of tactics: interview personally where possible to maximize chance remarks, or write questions on a sheet of paper with space for respondents to answer (29); learn the art of “getting along with irascible people” by becoming sympathetic and “roundabout” (27); defuse suspicion and reassure relatives that the project is honorable for the family, who “may suspect, however far it may be from the truth, that you are getting ready to claim some mythical estate” (42); show an artifact of the past—“Sometimes the sight of an old letter or a bit of silver recalls to an aging mind the story back of it or relationships that have been forgotten” (55); visit a cemetery with the relative and ask him or her to explain the relationships among those buried there (30). The budding genealogist develops a host of investigative skills for helping subjects to “get a life,” to talk of a historical past that will speak through them if their conscious or unconscious impediments to it are removed.

With these how-to’s, the researcher can resist autobiography’s grip by stripping information of its narrative elements and distilling the “facts” about the reliability of older relatives. “Beware of fantasy,” we are warned (SYA 37). The investigator must keep in mind the pursuit of verifiable objective truth. The “story” mapped by genealogy permits no narrative elaboration of data that are considered totalizing and transparent. Sources are notoriously unreliable, Doane and Bell insist, because of the tendency of the human mind to construct events using narrative techniques familiar to readers of both fiction and autobiography:

“Fiction,” the elaboration and deviation of historical “fact,” contaminates. To resist it, the researcher is urged to verify details and avoid what is “hearsay, not bona fide evidence” (SYA 34). Narrative accounts are not facts, and human subjects are unreliable.[11] They distort or report inaccurately, especially about events before their own times. Autobiographical fantasy invariably erodes historical fact.

Even individual memories of an event in which several participated can be unreliable: “It is sometimes very difficult to reconcile statements made by different members of the family” (SYA 28). What autobiography celebrates as the fruitful diversity of human memories of events is suspect to the genealogist. Where, for example, Mary McCarthy in Memories of a Catholic Girlhood contrasted various family members’ memories of a photographed moment, for the genealogist the truth must be unitary, verifiable, and charted in the family pedigree.[12]

Most dangerous to the genealogist, then, is human imagination, which willfully corrupts memory. Discussing the potential of diaries as sources of genealogical information, Doane and Bell warn that the writer’s personality may taint historical accuracy: “Unfortunately, sometimes the keeper of the diary was more interested in the affairs that were going on about him or her than in the details for which the genealogist is looking. In that case, however interesting it may be, the diary is a disappointment” (SYA 49). Wayward impressions threaten an orderly pedigree. Similarly, the Family History Library is deeply mistrustful of narrated family history. The USRO section on biography warns: “A biography is a history of a person’s life . . . [with] birth, marriage, and death information . . . [including] photographs, family traditions and stories, clues about an ancestor’s place of origin. . . . The information must be used carefully, however, because there may be inaccuracies” (9; my emphasis). No distinction is made between biography and autobiography; both can be contaminated by personal motives and subjective points of view, which contribute, however well-meaningly, to errors and inaccuracy. Research methodology demands careful evaluation of evidence: reliable sources, eyewitness or proximate accounts, internal consistency, and assessment of potential contradiction (USRO 4). Only impersonality and task orientation in the investigation can protect against the temptation to autobiographical fantasy.

The researcher’s quest is challenging. Record keepers may be “jealous” of records in public offices and “guard them from ‘alien hands’” (SYA 73). Access to personal history is for initiates, those with credentials attesting to their legitimate interest in their own past. The “detective” may also encounter state laws that prohibit use of personal records by those who are not provably genealogists or members of historical societies. But if the quest is riddled with obstacles, the investigator can also develop appropriate skills to navigate it. The genealogist learns to play hunches, to home in on clues, in order to enjoy the payoff of developing latent skills for detecting, unearthing, connecting to other times. In performing genealogical research correctly, the investigator becomes the family’s validated “life-giver.”

The “Why” of Doing Genealogy

Motives for doing genealogical research vary with the searcher and range from legitimating the tacitly certain to re-creating an unknown, inaccessible family history. They include validating and authorizing descendancy for membership purposes (especially in the Church of the Latter-day Saints), inserting the researcher into an insufficiently known past to be enriched by it, and uncovering and articulating an eradicated past as a means of gaining individual and transpersonal identity (e.g., in Alex Haley’s Roots).

The Family History Library materials that I have examined say little about the “why” of genealogy, but it is in fact a central Mormon practice. Within the belief structure of the Church, members seek to preserve genealogical records for family ancestors and establish generational connections in order to ensure they are saved. The practice by which deceased family members are saved is called “baptism of the dead.” According to Mormon Doctrine, “Genealogical research may be performed for those who have died without a knowledge of the gospel, but who presumably would have received it had the opportunity come to them.”[13] Through genealogical tracing, then, a family can not only discover, but save the lives of its ancestors; they get a second and eternal life through baptism and other rituals that bring them into what Mormons see as the true Church of Jesus Christ. Temple ordinances, necessary for salvation, are provided for deceased family members upon presentation of information about them to enable their inclusion among the elect (USRO 4). Families sharing common ancestors are urged to form “family organizations” for the purpose of keeping genealogical data current, as well as “to create family solidarity and honor the patriarchal system.”[14] The Family History Library also invites non-Mormon families to be recorded within its worldwide genealogical project by registering a documented family in the “Family Registry™,” which holds a nationwide collection of such records (USRO 22). Researchers are assured that these resources make one’s family history sharable with others, including possible “lost” relatives, and accessible to other genealogical searchers. No matter how fragmented the family may become in these postmodern times, its orderly contours will be mapped online for posterity.

What is not said, however, is that users may be “baptized” in a genealogical project more radically inclusive than the Family History Library indicates. According to Mormon theology, everyone who ever lived should have an opportunity to accept baptism and become a Mormon; whether they are dead or alive is inconsequential because all wait in the “spirit world” for the Millennium yet to come. Genealogical research identifies potential converts and establishes records of their baptism in church temples. Indeed, dozens of Roman Catholic saints have been baptized, Joan of Arc fourteen times.[15] Movie stars and famous statesmen have also been inducted, including all the signers of the Declaration of Independence.[16] This genealogical labor is vast in scope, given the estimate that nearly seventy billion have lived in the history of the world, and identification documents exist for only about 10 percent of them.[17] The church has now registered more than two billion names and has incorporated computer systems to allow quicker access to ancestral records. Anyone who chooses to research his or her genealogy through the Family History Library may eventually also get a second life as a Mormon—like it or not.

Searching for Your Ancestors, by contrast, has a secular, eclectic approach to the why of genealogy that is less compelling than salvation but also potentially transformative—the thrill of learning history with a personal connection: “You don’t dig merely to accumulate a lot of dry bones . . . you simply cannot back-trail your progenitors without becoming interested in the times in which they lived and in the various phases of their lives and activities” (SYA 5–6). History “assumes an intimate meaning” when the researcher discovers an ancestor who took part in a national event (SYA 6). The past becomes “fact rather than hearsay” (SYA 8). The imagination is stimulated as one becomes able to “picture” one’s ancestors as historical actors. Researching your genealogy promises that “history will become part of your blood” (SYA 8). Connecting to a generational family gives access to the nation itself and reactivates patriotic feeling as the individual invests in historical significance and experiences an intimate “blood” connection to events that were formerly only dates in history books. Studying family history becomes “an engrossing occupation, a new vocation for an active and inquisitive mind” (SYA 5).

Other more tangible rewards may also accrue if one can produce a verified genealogical pedigree: namely, membership in societies that require a family past documented as worthy. In addition to membership in churches requiring proof of origin, these include such groups as the Daughters of the American Revolution, the Society of Mayflower Descendants, and the Society of Colonial Wars. These societies are hereditary, have a patriotic orientation, and are by definition highly exclusionary. Testifying to one’s commitment to the goals of the organization will not suffice; either the bloodline is there or it is not. A similarity of surname is also insufficient, as experienced genealogists know that “claiming relationship because of identity of family names [is] treacherous” (SYA 276). Names do not necessarily signify descent from a common progenitor or even a shared nationality. Only researched family trees document historical claims to membership privilege among the historically elite, those who know who—that is, from whom—they are.

Another kind of motivation no doubt impels genealogists: to recreate symbolically the sense of familial connection that has been in fact displaced by geographic mobility and identity-shifting. The current popularity of tracing one’s family genealogy may relate to changes within the family itself: smaller number of children (on average fewer than two among Caucasian Americans); frequent divorce and remarriage, or serial monogamy as partnership; and changes in the life cycle that make parenthood in the home less than one-third of adult life experience and grandparenting an extended period. The family, shrunken to its nucleus, is expanded vertically through the family tree. Part of the lure of genealogy is that it charts a linear history foregrounding lineage as pedigree. It emphasizes the family’s sense of the stability and the “cleanness” of its ethnic composition, its maintenance of or “improvement” in social class, and the perpetuation from generation to generation of identified social institutions—religion, profession, the production of heirs.[18] Who begat whom, where, and in what line is knowledge that secures a patriarchal mooring in an increasingly destabilized world.

Immigrant and “Minority” Genealogy

Clearly, tracing a genealogical connection is most pleasurable for those with long, free histories in the United States. Recent immigrants and descendants of slaves may find their “intimate” connection to history more ambivalent and the quest more difficult. How-to’s focus on the documents associated with immigration and slavery, while avoiding or minimizing remarks concerning the oppressive histories that occasioned them. In an American context the right of equal access to documents, however unlikely, is assumed in genealogical method to normalize past inequities and abuses. The difficulties in the how-to’s are technical: records of immigrants before they have crossed an ocean or a border to enter the United States are kept by a wide variety of systems, if at all, in other countries. Typically, such records are in various languages and widely scattered regions that may have changed national identities several times. If we turn to accounts of how to map genealogy for historical “others,” it becomes clear that its practices have been formed around the normative WASP subjects who first invaded and ordered the Americas.

Personal and family histories negotiate the terms of identity informed by social categories, but also need to articulate what is compressed or subsumed in them. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson makes this point in a succinct summary of Bakhtin’s categories of identity, to which she makes crucial additions: “Bakhtin’s social groups are designated according to class, religion, generation, region, and profession. The interpretive model I propose extends and rereads Bakhtin’s theory from the standpoint of race and gender, categories absent in Bakhtin’s original system of social and linguistic stratification.”[19] Categories of race and gender are briefly touched on in many genealogical how-to’s, but they are usually addressed to a universal “he.” Typically, non-Europeans are treated as ethnically marked “others” and this marginal treatment justified by the course of European histories. The rationale given is that it is difficult to do research for non-Europeans, as for women, orphans, and the adopted, because census data often have not recorded them. Before 1850, for example, census records gave the name only for the head of the household; date of immigration is not listed until 1900 (USRO 12); cemetery records are helpful for “children who died young or women who were not recorded in family or government documents” (USRO 10). Genealogy’s reliance on pedigrees lacks a means of historical authorization for those without public social status or agency.

The Family History Library is particularly evasive, treating “minorities” as an elastic, apolitical concept. The United States Research Outline includes the following as examples: “the Irish in New York,” “Huguenot immigration,” “The Swedish-American Historical Quarterly,” “the American Historical Society of Germans from Russia in Lincoln, Nebraska” (USRO 36). Examples for the subject section of the library catalog cited are “BLACKS, AFRO AMERICANS, JEWS, and QUAKERS” (USRO 36). Thus the basis for the designation “minority” mixes ethnicities, religious identities, and historical examples of persecuted sects. The history sections of the Family History state research outlines I have examined are equally noncommittal on distinctions by ethnicity; they refrain from comment on crucial historical moments such as the Emancipation Proclamation, which politically legitimated ex-slaves. In the documentary “objectivity” of the United States Research Outline, “minority” expands to a category of all-embracing otherness that erases distinctions of persecution. Questions about historical agency, guilt, and blame are carefully avoided. But its construction of the family is implicitly Caucasian and European in origin, and it has difficulty accounting for others, especially those whose immigration was forced through slavery.

The umbrella categorization of “minority” thus hides a world of cultural differences. The category of “American” is presented neutrally and without allusion to central events of human history in the past five hundred years, such as the enslavement of African Americans and the genocide of millions of Jews. Certainly there is not comparable access to historical documentation of family ancestry for all the groups listed as examples of “minorities.” For would-be historians of Jewish family history, the United States Research Outline notes only, “The ancestors of most American Jewish families arrived in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries” (14). The recourse to immigration data evades the question of Jewish immigrants since the 1930s who fled persecution in Germany, the Soviet Union, and elsewhere. Nor does the Family History Library research outline give advice to survivor children of families that disappeared in the Holocaust. Where and how should they search for records? The treatment of ancestral history by the Family History Library as personalized and apolitical renders much and many unspeakable; those whose ancestors escaped persecution are the research norm.

Searching for Your Ancestors, on the other hand, makes an effort to address research issues concerning the diversity of cultural origins and difficulties in finding ancestors. The impact of historical events on compiling a family history for some groups is evident; for example, “the turbulent course of Irish history, crowned by the burning of the Public Record Office in Dublin” in 1922 destroyed many records that are needed by ancestral hunters (SYA 221). Difficulties that Jewish Americans may encounter in compiling family histories because of idiosyncratic naming practices, lack of surnames before the nineteenth century, and frequent modification of names as a result of migration between countries are noted. A history of persecution is recalled: the Diaspora from the twelfth century onward, the persecutions of the fifteenth and twentieth centuries, extensive emigration during the nineteenth century. Resources are recommended, such as the yizkor (memory books) kept for many Eastern European towns. There is an implicit acknowledgment that genealogical tracing is a complicated process for those not of the dominant culture.

Genealogy, as an institution, has universalized written records to legitimate family lineage and authorize identity, as becomes clear with two main categories of historical “others” in the United States, Native Americans and “free blacks,” who were often lumped together without ethnic distinction. (Slave schedules were prepared separately until 1860, with slaves listed under their owners’ names; SYA 205.)[20] Yet the procedures for tracing their genealogies are quite different.

In contrast to the historical authorization that genealogy books celebrate for subjects of European origin, emergence into its official written history coincided with diminished autonomy for Native Americans. Oral genealogies were devalued and family ties broken by missionary schools and the reservation system. Native American tribes, consisting of many interrelated families, are traditionally organized into clans; the network of relationships, which is preserved and known, may be large.[21] But from the perspective of genealogy, as an instrument of the American “civilizing mission,” this familial richness was regarded as a “heathen” lack of history that needed reorganizing under Christian auspices. Not only was the traditional clan system devalued and broken; written record keeping was in several respects driven by greed and ideological zeal. Colonial conquest in the New World naturalized the right and descent lines of the conquerors, a fact that the how-to manuals do not acknowledge.

The treatment of Native American history depends to a significant extent on the ideological persuasion of the genealogical group or author. The Mormon Family History Library, which still uses genealogical research actively as a means of proselytizing, states blandly that “before 1830, Indians living among non-Indians were generally encouraged to accept Christianity and adopt western customs” (USRO 36).[22] Similarly, Family History Library publications characterize federal government intervention as benign “civilizing.” They note the concern of the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) for “educating the Indians” and land allotment trusts that registered an individual and his heirs until he “demonstrated his competency to administer the land” as required, which they observe that most Indians did not succeed in doing; hence the persistence of reservations (USRO 38).

Searching for Your Ancestors, in contrast, discusses how to investigate Native American heritage by implicitly acknowledging native peoples’ dispossession and domination by Europeans, “a heritage eroded by three-and-a-half centuries of mistreatment and injustice” (SYA 183). Its how-to acknowledges the use of genealogical recording as a justificatory mechanism for conversion, though it stops short of critiquing the use of genealogy as a means of domination in the New World. Doane and Bell provide background on Native American history, as the Church of Latter-day Saints manual does not, that traces the simultaneous recording and erasure of Native Americans. Their mini-history of encounters with religious and civil bureaucracy recounts the dispossession of Native Americans through the manipulation of documents. The main record keepers, Christian churches (notably the Franciscan and Jesuit missionaries of Roman Catholicism) and the federal government, especially the BIA, from 1850 to 1952, are identified as prime forces of colonization, along with the military. The full or partial omission of Indians in federal censuses until 1890 is noted (SYA 185). The special censuses of the Creek and Cherokee nations (made in 1832 and 1835, respectively) prior to removing them from their lands for the westward march along the “Trail of Tears” are cited as evidence of the marginalization of native peoples in American documentary life.

Indeed, Doane and Bell are revealing on how the evidentiary documents required to do genealogy were prohibited. Native Americans could not file wills until 1910, and then only with approval by the commissioner of Indian affairs (SYA 187). Starting in 1885, when most Indians had been forced onto reservations, the federal government took annual rolls of them for taxation purposes (see Indian census rolls, 1885–1940; SYA 186); these were not done alphabetically and could include several different names for given individuals. Identities became unstable, contingent. The National Archive of Tribal Records (in Washington, D.C., and regional branches) contains much documentary information, but the searcher is warned to consult a guide and learn the labyrinthine administrative structure of the BIA before embarking on a project (SYA 185). Indeed, the subtext of this discussion is a sober and cautionary one: European migration to the New World established some American dynasties at the cost of dislodging the collective identities of native peoples, miring them in a bureaucratic apparatus of imposed regulations, geographically, politically, and genealogically.

The situation of African Americans also poses problems for genealogical how-to books and exposes their normatively European assumptions. The Family History Library’s advice is scarce, unspecific, and noncommittal; mixed racial ancestry is not a category in the Family History Library research outlines. Its reticence needs to be read in light of beliefs encoded in the Book of Mormon, which, according to its critics, refers to a dark skin as a “curse” (p. 201, verse 6), signifying transgression and inferior status, a valuation of normative whiteness that has strongly racist overtones, though the recent (1978) granting of the Mormon priesthood to “blacks” may suggest a renegotiation of traditional prejudices.[23]

Searching for Your Ancestors, by contrast, devotes a subsection to “African-American ancestors” in which the impact of historical events is sympathetically, if ineffectually, acknowledged (202–10). Americanization is a traumatic process:

The authors note the disruption of family life for slaves, the paucity of family records because marriages were not legally binding, and the late date of constitutional amendments mandating equality. They list sources for African Americans to consult[24] and suggest methods for using vital records, lists of beneficial societies, and African American newspapers. But the implication is clear: the degree of historical accuracy in one’s genealogical pedigree depends to a significant extent on one’s ancestors’ cultural status before 1850. White male Western Europeans will be more successful than others in verifying their ancestral pedigrees.

Unlike the Family History Library, Searching for Your Ancestors acknowledges the difficulty of providing “proof of a family’s past” for African Americans (207). Descendants confront the historical fact that slaves were regarded as property and included in estates that were passed from generation to generation. Information is more available in wills, tax records, and manumission statements than in plantation accounts, many of which were lost or destroyed (207). Although mixed ancestry is acknowledged in the heritage of many African Americans—“liaisons were a feature of plantation life until the end of the Civil War” (208)—its origin in practices such as rape is omitted; the work of tracing erased networks of descendancy falls to fictional texts such as Toni Morrison’s Beloved.

Doane and Bell’s how-to book thus neutralizes the transgressive character of power relationships under slavery. The African American reader is offered sanguine, Disney-like advice on finding African ancestors: “Your search should focus on the nations and tribes of that region” (SYA 208); “A trip to Africa may be necessary” (SYA 208); “Griots . . . are really walking and talking libraries” (SYA 209). But for West Africa, an area larger than the entire United States and populated by hundreds of “tribes” or ethnic groups with several unrelated language families, such advice is delusive. Its bland generalizations gloss over differences of language and ethnicity and ignore problems of time, access to griots, language differences, and the money necessary for extended research. Hypothetically, one can find one’s black ancestors—with the resources of, say, Bill Cosby.[25] The reader is gently encouraged to seek “inspiration” in Roots.

What use are African American descendants of slaves to make of genealogy as familial authorization? How may they lay claim to a generational family history, the legitimating basis of white American culture? Though how-to books can offer little, strategic intervention in the documents-driven impulse of genealogy has been posed by the alternative of creation and recovery of the family in myth.

Roots: Genealogy as Cultural Quest

In these two passages Alex Haley suggests the genealogical methods that Roots applies and its mythic cross-purposes. Roots links two narratives: the imagined saga of Kunta Kinte of Juffure (a river village now in The Gambia), who comes to the United States in a slave ship and begets heirs whom Haley can, with increasing accuracy, document as his forebears; and Haley’s own saga of a twelve-year search for pre-slavery origins in the Old World as a transforming personal pilgrimage. The language of mythic saga moving from an indefinite ur-past toward the present generation in Kunta Kinte’s family line is counterpointed by the language of genealogical method as a process of detection for Haley’s own quest. Placing his “frame” story of how he wrote Roots after the six-hundred-page ancestral saga, Haley makes a tree of oral history to negotiate a collective African American entry into genealogical record. By relying on the oral transmission of griots, he utilizes genealogical method yet subverts its Western dependence on writing. In this way Roots offers a mode of historical authentication replacing the traditional practice of genealogy with an older, oral tradition that is unverifiable in written documents but functions nonetheless as collective autobiography.

Roots’s success as a bestseller of genealogy has not been lost on its practitioners; Doane and Bell note that is has sold more than twelve million copies and been translated into thirty-seven languages (SYA xi). Roots is a cultural phenomenon that speaks to a widespread need to mobilize the authority of genealogy in redressing American familial and social relations.[27] It meditates on the centrality of ancestral “rooting” to self-understanding and values family as a repository of generational memory that is ultimately oral and pre-documentary. Roots insists on the primacy of the griot, the oral rememberer with scriptural authority.[28] “Throughout the whole of black Africa such oral chronicles had been handed down since the time of the ancient forefathers” (674). Oral history is revalued as a means of self-discovery in the search for “our ancestral tribe” (671). The narrative begins with the birth of Kunta Kinte and concludes with the death and burial of Haley’s father as the sons, “members of the seventh generation from Kunta Kinte,” eulogize his life, their individual memories now embedded in mythic history (688). That moment coincides with the completion of Haley’s twelve-year project and his own emergence into ancestrally located self-consciousness.

In his account of how he came to research and write Roots, Haley spins a tale that reinterprets genealogical objectivity and points to an unstable narrative core lurking at the heart of its method. Roots is finally circular in giving its author-questor a resonant familial identity and cultural heritage. Haley voyages in space as well as time, traversing West Africa and archival and maritime sites up and down the Atlantic coast. His voyage to Juffure fuses the language of revelation and dream: going forward in time to return to an originary place in which griots still recite hundreds of years of genealogical descent. The locus of Roots is itself ambivalent, with one pole in the village of Juffure and the other on Gorée Island, about one hundred miles away, off Dakar, Senegal, where thousands of slaves were detained after captivity for inspection, shackling, and chained export to the Americas. Genealogical research is impossible in Gorée’s historical museum, which contains no written records. As Haley wryly concludes, “Preponderantly the histories have been written by the winners” (688).

Haley’s own genealogical quest is a detective story, in which he becomes a detective on a breathless and at times reckless quest for clues in the stages of the investigation: “If any black American could be so blessed as I had been to know only a few ancestral clues—could he or she know who was either the paternal or maternal African ancestor or ancestors, and about where that ancestor lived when taken, and finally about when the ancestor was taken—then only those few clues might well see that black American able to locate some wizened old black griot whose narrative could reveal the black American’s ancestral clan, perhaps even the very village” (680).

Detection mingles with the discourse of quasi-religious election as Haley comes to see himself as the scribe designated to write the Word and unravel the history of the Kinte clan “as if a scroll were being read” (678). Genealogy as cultural quest can inscribe an authorized African American history by revalidating the oral and everyday erased in the writing of official history. Haley mobilizes the tools of the scriptural historian: the name fragment of “Kintay” lingers in his memory until curiosity activates it as his own “Rosetta Stone” to be decoded (669). Haley’s narrative is teleological, moving toward the final “fulfillment” chapters, where he is revealed as both the narrator who has been in the background and the inheritor and bearer of a genealogical tradition. Implicitly his mission offers African Americans a way of “getting a life” that is generationally resonant in providing symbolic tools for social mobility and familial consolidation.

Roots opens an alternative context for potent family history in the oral culture of a Mandinke village and enlivens genealogical detail with the biographical richness of narrative. Mimicking the griot, Haley makes genealogical record into a “talking book.”[29] He reforms the detached objectivity of the genealogist into an instrument for reinventing the family as a transformative experience for the reader-searcher. In so doing, he uncovers in genealogy a transparently autobiographical impetus that it abhors yet secretes as familial “glue.” The pointed mistrust of genealogists for autobiography may be read against its covert narrative “itch.” Roots both calls on and confounds documentary evidence in exposing the speculative character and mythic power of genealogical legitimation for historically invisible subjects.

Autobiography and Genealogy: Incompatible Frames of Reference?

I first became aware of the immensity of the genealogical enterprise in the United States when I attended the yearly convention of the Montana State Genealogical Society, along with more than a hundred people who journeyed for as long as ten hours to convene, appropriately, in Great Falls to discuss their descendancy. There were two speakers, a professor of history expert in genealogy from Brigham Young University, who had worked extensively with the Family History Library in Salt Lake City; and myself, a displaced Midwesterner defending the usefulness of autobiography for family history. We had virtually no assumptions in common. The expert focused on records: how to track down, gain access to, verify, and possess acceptable copies of them. For him, family history was a matter of irrefutable documentation and unambiguous attribution. I, on the other hand, was interested in family history as a means of collective self-creation giving voice to the past, be it in attic diaries or fragments of memory or silent, inherited things. This experience led me to wonder whether autobiography and genealogy have anything to say to each other. Are they mutually informing, sustainable activities, or unrelated, incompatible impulses?

These questions are not idle ones, because the issues of the autobiographical referent, the relationship of the one who writes to the one who speaks, and the verification of that identity in a “pact” with the reader have been at the heart of debates about autobiography since Philippe Lejeune theorized the autobiographical pact. Critics have disputed whether the subject of autobiography is referential or in some sense deconstructed, always already de-faced. Paul John Eakin argues for relocating the referentiality of autobiography to its mode of representing the subject’s inscription in history. He notes that theoreticians of autobiography have moved from “a documentary view of autobiography as a record of referential fact to a performative view of autobiography centered on the act of composition” as a revised way of conceiving “the reality of the past.”[30]

Unwilling to surrender the referential dimension of autobiography yet concerned with “the agency of the imagination” and “the individual’s constructed relation to history,” Eakin proposes two projects: (1) reconceiving the work of history phenomenologically as “the individual’s experience of ‘historicity,’” and (2) expanding our awareness of the kinds of historical reference that autobiography may make (144–45). Eakin’s analysis suggests that autobiography can furnish a more extensive account of lived history than can the documented historical record. In that sense the autobiographical story of the family is a “truer” account than the genealogical pedigree, precisely because it incorporates several modes of rendering lived experience. Haley’s project in Roots, the genealogical quest subsumed in a mythic history impossible to verify through documents, has resonated as a collective authorization, or what Eakin terms a “sustaining structure of relation” to the past through autobiographical writing (157).

Autobiography and genealogy address personal history from different locations and for different ends. Whereas documenting historical “fact” is at the heart of genealogy, autobiography does not rely on the verifiability of the information given, but on something else that has been variously described as the sincerity of the writer-reader pact (Lejeune), belief in the writer’s credible ethos (Beaujour), and multiple modes of representing lived history (Eakin).[31] Autobiography is located at an uneasy nexus of past—the retrospective record of one’s life—and future—the wishes, dreams, and aspirations of the subject-in-process. Autobiography’s multi-directionality is inflected by eruptions of the present, its “present-ification” in Louis Renza’s term, that repeatedly destabilize the linear narrative with the complexity of self-experience in the moment of writing.[32] Subject-ification, autobiography as the liberation of possible identities from past fixity, is a coming to voice inimical to the descent-oriented project of genealogy. Although autobiography does not create stable, autonomous, free subjects that endure, it proposes the liberatory possibility of human agency—for future readers, if not for the writer. Genealogy’s use of life history retrospectively, by contrast, embeds legitimate subjects in an extended historical chain.

Genealogy and autobiography can be contrasted on several counts:

In this comparison autobiography emerges, in Sollors’s sense, as consent-driven, if not fully consensual.

Genealogical pedigrees are inadequate and even misleading schemata for explaining the multi-referentiality of autobiography. The force of ancestry may be strong in an autobiography such as The Education of Henry Adams, where descent from a family of British subjects who became American presidents and statesmen and his father’s autobiography cast a long shadow on the writer’s own project. But the imbrication of autobiography and genealogy is unavailable to, say, fifth-generation ex-slaves in the mid-nineteenth century writing a narrative of liberation from the “hell” of slavery, who could not present ancestral records to legitimate themselves. In autobiography the desire for origin and rooting has to be relocated from the verifiable past to a sense of emergent and incomplete history existing in a productive tension between individual and public notions of experience. If genealogy is driven by an ideology of the durability of family and the significance of origins now being contested in postmodern America, does genealogy sustain a nostalgia for what, in some sense, never was? The pedigree that embeds the contemporary nuclear family in a network reaching several generations into the past suggests a yearning for verifiable historical connection. Autobiography both cultivates and resists a genealogical impulse in its inclination to “root” self-location and self-understanding in the experience of lived history. Getting an autobiographical life neither replicates models of selfhood uncritically nor appropriates the privileges of subjectivity recklessly. And yet the genealogical project, in another sense, has been revived as a critical method for reforming the imperial gesture of autobiographical selfhood, the claim to “have” a historically significant life.

“Genealogical” historicization, as distinct from the institution of tracing family origins, is used by recent theorists uneasy about the imperializing and ethnocentric claims of identity discourses. Following Foucault, Michael J. Shapiro has proposed the application of genealogical method as a critical apparatus for political analysis.[33] Shapiro’s notion of “genealogical history loosens the hold of present arrangements by finding their points of emergence as practices and thus by opposing the forces tending to neutralize them.”[34] Shapiro explicitly contrasts the genealogical and the (auto)biographical as opposed modes of cultural analysis: the (auto)biographical posits an individual, autonomous human subject that imposes its view of the world as the mode of interpretation and naturalizes its others. The genealogical, in contrast, is a method that attempts to evacuate subjectivity from the analysis of practices by making it critically, ironically self-conscious. A genealogical understanding makes a textually registered acknowledgment that what it represents are humanly constituted “peculiar acts of the imagination rather than . . . outer structures of the world.”[35]

Shapiro’s argument for the genealogist as a figure of the postmodern critic radically reinterprets the practice of traditional genealogists that I have been tracing and suggests a model for rethinking the position of the autobiographer as well. If genealogy as a naturalized practice has forgotten its own contextual basis, ironically self-critical theorizing may correct the excesses of imposing subjects and the evacuation of othered subjects. The implications of this critical reinterpretation exceed the reach of this essay, but they suggest a possible redirection of the genealogical impulse to privilege descent and hierarchy. Genealogy as a liberatory method of relationality without pedigrees may become, for the reflective subject, a means of getting a new kind of life.

Notes

1. Anzia Yezierska, Children of Loneliness (New York: Funk & Wagnalls, 1923), 10. Quoted in William Boelhower, “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography in the United States,” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 137.

2. Philippe Lejeune, “The Autobiographical Pact (bis),” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1989), 133.

3. Louis Renza, “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 293.

4. This information is taken from a handout of the Lawrence Ward Family History Center. Another center handout notes that a worldwide index available on microfiche lists about 187 million names of deceased persons; living persons are not included. The church’s Family History Library materials may be used at its centers throughout the world by persons of any faith.

5. Crèvecoeur idealistically states that genealogy will count for nothing in the New World: “the American . . . is neither an European nor the descendant of an European; hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country . . . the American . . . leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced.” St. John de Crèvecoeur, “Letter III—What Is an American?” in Letters from an American Farmer: An Early American Reader, ed. J. A. Leo Lemay (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1985), 120.

6. Werner Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity: Consent and Descent in American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1986). Sollors is critical of the emphasis on ethnic identity and roots: “In the present climate consent-conscious Americans are willing to perceive ethnic distinction—differentiation which they seemingly base exclusively on descent, no matter how far removed and how artificially selected and constructed—as powerful and as crucial. . . . Taken to its radical conclusion, such a position really assumes that there is no shared history and no human empathy, that you have your history and I have mine” (13). But as Sau-Ling Cynthia Wong has argued, it is impossible to go “beyond ethnicity” without engaging multiple differences both among ethnicities and within the generations of each, a complex discussion that she sees Sollors and Boelhower as unwilling to engage. See Wong, “Immigrant Autobiography: Some Questions of Definition and Approach,” in American Autobiography: Retrospect and Prospect, ed. Paul John Eakin (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991), 142–70.

7. Boelhower, “The Making of Ethnic Autobiography,” 137.

8. The United States Research Outline is officially titled Research Outline: United States, but is usually referred to by the former name; I will henceforth refer to it as USRO, and page numbers will appear in the text. I will refer to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by conventional usage as the Mormons or the Church of Latter-day Saints. The genealogical materials of the Family History Library that I used in preparing this essay include “Research Outline: Michigan,” “Research Outline: Montana,” and “Research Outline: United States” (Salt Lake City: Corporation of the President of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, 1988).

9. The information on archives, libraries, journals, and bibliographies is drawn from both the United States Research Outline and from Gilbert H. Doane and James B. Bell, Searching for Your Ancestors: The How and Why of Genealogy, 6th ed. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), especially 309 (henceforth SYA). Page numbers for further citations of this work appear in text in parentheses. The enduring popularity of this how-to is attested to by its numerous editions and by its selection for the Quality Paperback Book Club in 1992, the marketing materials of which described it as “the most readable and reliable genealogical how-to book available.”

10. Metaphors of detection and uncovering, so important for genealogy, are of course central to Freudian psychoanalysis. In Freud’s Gradiva, the archaeological project of excavating forgotten layers of memory within the individual psyche is compared to a set of strata throughout the history of a culture. Similarly, genealogical inquiry is seen as access to the textured strata of national history.

11. Narrativization of life history is being interestingly investigated from several disciplinary approaches. Psychologists, for example, have used the observations of Jerome Bruner (see “Life as Narrative,” Social Research 54 [1987]: 11–32) about narrative construction of life history to study “autobiographical memory”: how oral narrators subdivide memories into episodes or “chapters,” segments that they have analyzed and compared with written memories solicited in other studies. See David B. Pilmer, Lynne Krensky, Sandra N. Kleinman, Lynn R. Goldsmith, and Sheldon H. White, “Chapters on Narratives: Evidence from Oral Histories of the First Year in College,” Journal of Narrative and Life History 1 (1991): 3–14, especially 3–5.

12. Mary McCarthy, Memories of a Catholic Girlhood (New York: Harcourt Brace 1957).

13. Bruce R. McConkie, Mormon Doctrine, 2d ed. (Salt Lake City: Bookcraft, 1966), 308–9.

14. Ibid., 274.

15. Vern Anderson, “Dead or Alive, Mormons Want Everyone Baptized” (Associated Press), in Missoulian, April 30, 1994, A-5. Baptized saints include Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Francis of Assisi, and many others.

16. “Endless Genealogies,” in Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? 5th ed., ed. Jerald Tanner and Sandra Tanner (Salt Lake City: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987), 452. A testimonial entry by John Taylor, third president of the Mormon Church, states that the spirits of the signers “waited on me for two days and two nights” until he could be baptized for them, along with Christopher Columbus, John Wesley, and all U.S. presidents but three whose cause was not yet “just.” Quoted in Journal of Discourses 19: 229.

17. Anderson, “Dead or Alive.” Although duplications are a problem, during the Millennium mortal mistakes in record gathering and recording are to be rectified: “The Creator has the master list.”

18. Tamara K. Hareven, “Continuity and Change in the American Family,” in Making America, ed. Luther S. Luedtke (Washington, D.C.: U.S. Information Agency, 1987), 253–55. Hareven notes: “The historical evidence now shows that there has never been in American society an era when co-residence of three generations in the same household was the dominant pattern. The ‘great extended families’ that have become part of the folklore of modern industrial society were rarely in existence” (241–42).

19. Mae Gwendolyn Henderson, “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics, and the Black Woman Writer’s Literary Tradition,” in Reading Black, Reading Feminist, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Penguin, 1990), 139, n. 6.

20. Note the carefully neutral language in which Doane and Bell describe historical “othering”: “There was no special procedure for noting free blacks in the first census, so they were frequently recorded in the ‘other’ category, which also included American Indians. Furthermore, the census enumerators freely noted of some families that they were Negro, mulatto, or free, but some received no racial designation at all. Until 1850 only the heads of households were identified by name” (SYA 205).

21. For example, Gerard Baker, the first Native American superintendent of Little Big Horn National Monument (formerly Custer Battlefield), has noted that he has eighty-seven familial relationships, all of which are known. Lecture delivered at the University of Montana, September 15, 1994.

22. A prejudice against dark skin in some parts of the Book of Mormon notwithstanding. See the discussion below of African Americans and the Book of Mormon.

23. This information is taken from Jerald Tanner and Sandra Tanner, eds., Mormonism: Shadow or Reality? 5th ed. (Salt Lake City: Utah Lighthouse Ministry, 1987). The Tanners were excommunicated, at their request, from the Mormon Church in 1960 for challenging its doctrines, and they have waged a critique of Mormon doctrine in their books and newsletter, Salt Lake City Messenger, since that time. Their pre-1978 chapter, “The Negro in Mormon Theology,” cites derogatory passages on the barbarism of dark-skinned peoples from several additional Mormon sources, notably The Juvenile Instructor (262–63). Unquestionably this critique is controversial, but it is supported by a sizable group of questioning and ex-Mormons. I am indebted to my colleague Judith Johnson at the University of Montana for the Tanner texts and the narrative of her firsthand experience.

24. Sources for material on Black life in both the United States and Africa include the bibliographical guide Black Genesis (James Rose and Alice Eicholz, 1978), the histories of free blacks by Carter G. Woodson, Black military records, and the Schomburg Library in New York City (SYA 204–5).

25. See Johni Cerny, “From Maria to Bill Cosby: A Case Study in Tracing Black Slave Ancestry,” National Genealogical Society Quarterly 75 (March 1987): 5–14 cited in SYA (207). Cerny is a noted genealogist who attempted to establish the family line of the Cosby family.

26. Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday, 1976), 686, 681. Page references for further citations of this work are included in the text in parentheses.

27. At this time discussion of Haley’s project is complicated by the “discovery,” after his death, that much of the “authenticated” material left in his estate and used for the television miniseries Queen was fictionalized rather than documented by research. This discovery has made less certain some of his statements about genealogical verification in Roots. See New York Times, March 3, 1993, C18:4. For this essay the “truth” question is not central, however, as Haley was demonstrably mobilizing a vast machinery of documentary verification to authorize, through an oral tradition, subjects for whom documents of written origin are largely absent.

28. The griot is a liminal figure because he or she spins tales and uses rhetoric in mediating; traditionally, griots are of the lowest social caste and are shunned by uncasted warriors. For an elegant and sophisticated discussion of the functions of griots in traditional West African cultures, see Christopher L. Miller, Theories of Africans (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), especially 79–87 and 114–80.

29. The trope of the talking book has been important for recent theorizing of African American autobiography. See especially Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 127–68.

30. Paul John Eakin, Touching the World: Reference in Autobiography (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 143. Page references for further citations of this work are included in the text in parentheses.

31. The difference of autobiography from fiction is discussed by Philippe Lejeune in “The Autobiographical Pact,” in On Autobiography, ed. Paul John Eakin, trans. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 3–30. Autobiography as doxa, received opinion, rather than biography, is explored in Michel Beaujour, Miroirs d’encre (Paris: Seuil, 1980). Autobiography as lived history is discussed in Eakin, Touching the World, 138–80.

32. Louis Renza, “The Veto of the Imagination: A Theory of Autobiography,” in Autobiography: Essays Theoretical and Critical, ed. James Olney (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1980), 277–79.

33. See also Walter Benn Michaels, “Race into Culture: A Critical Genealogy of Cultural Identity,” Critical Inquiry 18 (Summer 1992): 655–85. Benn Michaels applies the “objectivity” of genealogical tracing as a corrective to ethnicity-based identity claims and, in so doing, uses a “genealogical” method to subvert the discourse of descent by which such claims are privileged. Benn Michaels’s position is, however, extreme; he views all claims to identity as “essentialist” (689 n. 39).

34. Michael J. Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern Polity: Political Theory as Textual Practice (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), 12. Shapiro also conducts a sustained critique of biography in The Politics of Representation: Writing Practice in Biography, Photography, and Policy Analysis (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1988). As his analysis does not make a distinction between autobiography and biography, I would argue that his critique applies primarily to biographical texts and acts, whereas the conditions of autobiographical selfhood require a critical self-analysis of self as simultaneously subject and object. Thus, much autobiographical reflexivity acknowledges its own constructed and unstable status, its distance from “outer structures of the world.”

35. Shapiro, Reading the Postmodern Polity, 10.