“Maybe it was inevitable that humans would choose to explain the order of things to themselves in this way,” Newton says. A verse of the Hindu scripture Rigveda, which describes how the gods divided the cosmic being Purusha into four parts-to form priests, warriors, merchants, and laborers-has been interpreted, controversially, as justifying the development of caste. These were echoed by the Gospels of Luke and Matthew, which took pains to endow Jesus with descent from Adam and Abraham, respectively and by later Arabic genealogies that traced the Prophet Muhammad’s ancestry to Abraham. The “begats” of the Old Testament reflected the importance of lineage as a basis for authority in the ancient Near East. Egyptian pharaohs styled themselves sons of Amun-Ra, and Chinese emperors were “sons of heaven.” Inca emperors traced their pedigree to the sun, Roman rulers to Venus, and Merovingians to a sea monster. Ruling dynasties often boasted of sacred or supernatural ancestors. Origin stories provide collective accounts of where “we” come from, but they also help some lineages claim power over others. The origin story that we tend to believe today describes the emergence, through evolution, of anatomically modern humans in Africa about three hundred thousand years ago. The God of the Old Testament, after making the heavens and the earth and filling them with birds, animals, and fish, “formed man of the dust of the ground,” and from the man’s rib fashioned woman.
The sacred text of the K’iche’ Maya people, Popol Vuh, describes how the creators tried making human beings from clay, but they crumbled in the rain then from wood, but they were stiff and unfeeling and then from ground-up yellow and white maize, with water for blood, and they grew healthy, fat, and expressive. In Norse tradition, the gods Odin, Vili, and Ve turned an ash tree and an elm tree into man and woman, and infused them with breath, intelligence, and speech. Virtually every culture tells a story about the origins of humankind-a story about its ancestry. Why and how this has come to be has an ancestry of its own. “The stories we tell ourselves about our ancestors have the power to shape us,” Newton observes. From the doctor’s office to the passport office, ancestry inflects the social, material, legal, and medical conditions of nearly everybody’s life. But, whatever you think about genealogy, it has profound ramifications for you. The genealogical behemoth Ancestry, which boasts more than three million subscribers and the nation’s largest genetic database, was purchased for $4.7 billion in 2020.įor those not drawn to genealogy, such an interest can seem “at best, embarrassing, if not a sign of narcissism and pitiable aspiration,” Maud Newton acknowledges in a candid memoir about her own genealogical obsession, “ Ancestor Trouble” (Random House). The Silicon Valley-based testing company 23andMe, which formed a partnership with Airbnb to market “travel as unique as your DNA,” went public in June, 2021, with a valuation of $3.5 billion. Those claims should be sprinkled with a few grains of salt, but more than twenty-six million people have taken genetic ancestry tests since 2012, incidentally creating a database of huge value to pharmaceutical companies and law enforcement.
It’s often said that genealogical research is the second most popular hobby in the United States, after gardening, and the second most popular search category online, after porn. “You hardly meet an American who does not want to be connected a bit by his birth to the first settlers of the colonies, and, as for branches of the great families of England, America seemed to me totally covered by them,” Alexis de Tocqueville marvelled in 1840.
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The collection, owned and operated by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, is the largest physical archive of ancestry in the world. They contain billions of images of genealogical documents, an estimated quarter of all vital records on earth. Behind doors designed to withstand a nuclear strike, through tunnels blasted six hundred feet into the rock, in a vault that’s another seven hundred feet down, lies a trove stashed in steel cases: not bullion or jewels but microfilm, millions of reels of it. This content can also be viewed on the site it originates from.Ī mile into Utah’s Little Cottonwood Canyon, heading east from Salt Lake City toward the Wasatch ski slopes, several concrete arches open into the face of a mountain.
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