Family Trees: A History of Genealogy on America by François Weil (review)

With this book, well-respected François Weil proposes a history of the Americanization of genealogy as a (West) European practice and the transposition of its main concepts, such as lineage and forebears, into the North American context. Weil admits he was not interested in family history before taking on this project. The inspiration came in 2008, from his surprise at the “engrossing fascination” (p. 1) given by journalists and the public at Barack and Michelle Obama’s respective ancestries. At the confluence of racial affiliation, the history of slavery and immigration, and issues of class, Weil argues that their genealogies beckoned enquiries into the meaning of personal and collective history, but most importantly on the importance of family history in the United States. As such, Family Trees casts its gaze broadly, over four centuries, tracing the evolution of the practice, the varying rationales of its actors, and the main institutions that led the way.

Weil’s assertion that there is a relative dearth of historical research on genealogy is somewhat misleading. Though it is true that there have been relatively few studies by American historians, the study of genealogy has been a rich field among historical anthropologists, ethnohistorians, sociologists and members of related fields all over the Western World, especially in the late 1980s and 1990s. However, there has been very few syntheses of these works, and few publications since the beginning of the 21^st century (my own 2006 monograph being a rare exception). As such, Weil’s book is indeed more than welcome: he presents a readable comprehensive overview of the history of the practice and meaning of genealogy in the United States from the late 17^th century, based both on the studies that do exist and hitherto unknown examples from his own original research.

Weil divides his book into four lengthy periods he calls “genealogical regimes” (p. 5). As such, Weil adheres to the common periodization used by those few historians and sociologists that have studied genealogical practice in North America. Each of these four periods “was articulated around a particular organization of impulses for genealogy [he] describe[s], with one of several of these impulses setting the tone for that regime” (p. 5). Indeed, Weil is more interested in each period’s ideological stance about ancestry than at the socioeconomic conditions that could have affected the impulses towards genealogy. He looks for its “successive dominant meanings” (p. 5), though he innovates by tracking the commercial aspects of American genealogy throughout its long history.

Prior to the mid-18^th century, the American Colonials who researched their ancestry were primarily fulfilling a private quest for a pedigree that would attach their family to British Imperial gentility. It was mostly the purview of New England upper middle classes. By the latter half of the 18^th century, with the transition to Independence, the impetus for genealogy shifted as sharply as American politics. Genealogists of middling classes turned to genealogy as a means to ground their family history in the emerging republic. Until the advent of the Civil War, Americans of means would invest scientific value to genealogical research, even as the many genealogists for hire would go to great lengths to invest suitable ancestries for their clients. From the late 1860s to the mid-20^th century, as the United States experienced a wave of nationalism, nativism and anti-immigration sentiment, genealogy became more of a search for racial purity and Anglo-Saxon ancestors. “Proper” ancestry would not only allow one admission to numerous hereditary associations and clubs, but was also increasingly associated with overtones of morality and purity. Notably, the advent of Eugenics and its sociological views of genetics easily found strong support among American genealogists who embraced the moral superiority the “correct” ancestors would afford them. After the Second World War and especially from the 1970s, genealogy became a truly popular, democratic and multicultural endeavour. Taken on by Americans of all social and ethnic...