24 The New York Reviewwas still widespread in factories,
mines, and agriculture in the 1910s.
These seemingly innocuous repre-
sentations, that nonwhite babies,
toddlers, and children could be
clean, prosperous- looking, and well
cared for, contested a bundle of ra-
cial stereotypes.... Wordlessly, the
procession of impeccably dressed,
round- cheeked children also af-
firmed the endurance of Black and
brown people’s family ties in the
face of wars of attrition on such
bonds. Loving hands had bathed the
youngsters, laundered and ironed
their clothes, arranged their hair,
and photographed them in a pleas-
ing light. Loving attitudes had gar-
nered the children’s cooperation.
Babies and toddlers sat peaceably
before the camera.The photos were printed, she notes, at
the same time that white- baby monu-
ments were being put up around the
country. By implication the images
refuted “the presumptions of white
supremacy” and the “social- Darwinist
assertion that African Americans’ high
rates of fatal illnesses and infant mor-
tality demonstrated their inferiority
to whites and forecasted a vanishing
race.”
Du Bois’s baby pictures were just
one sign of the importance of docu-
menting family life and lineage, and
Morgan provides detailed discussion
of early genealogical efforts made by
African Americans, Native Ameri-
cans, and American Jews. Blocked by
the national SAR, Du Bois wrote in
The Crisis about his own and others’
connections to the American Revolu-
tion, supporting the formation, in 1930,
of the first major hereditary group for
African Americans, the Society of De-
scendants of New England Negroes.
Yet “genealogical trees do not flour-
ish among slaves,” as Frederick Doug-
lass wrote in 1855. Long after the end of
the Civil War, research remained diffi-
cult for African Americans, who were
often forced to resort to lore and oral
sources. Marriages of enslaved people
had no legal status and often went un-
recorded, as did births. Descendants of
former slaves eager to reconstruct their
families’ stories were hard put to locate
documentary evidence, Morgan writes:
“Jim Crow stalked Black researchers
even in the library. Public libraries in
the South either excluded Blacks alto-
gether or relegated them to inferior,
segregated facilities.”
Better- situated scholars found a way.
At Harvard, Caroline Bond Day, a
mixed- race graduate student in anthro-
pology, wrote her thesis on “Negro-
white families in the United States”
and published it in 1932. Although
she encountered many who shied away
from examining their ancestry and the
history behind it, she interviewed 346
families, including Du Bois’s, record-
ing their names, photographs, profes-
sions, and incomes. “Such people knew
full well that displays of their faces
and lineages, combined with evidence
of successes, affirmed contemporary
struggles against white supremacy,”
Morgan notes. A teacher from Georgia
wrote in response, “What a pleasure it
is to know that our people are accom-
plishing great things!”
Day’s work was followed by that of
the writer, poet, and civil rights ac-
tivist Pauli Murray, whose genealogi-
cal exploration began when she was ateenager as a means of exposing what
she called “Jane Crow,” referring to
Black women’s experience of racism.
She transcribed the recollections of
her “race aunts,” building over some
twenty years an extensive family his-
tory from oral interviews, archival re-
search, letters, and albums. Published
in 1956, Proud Shoes: The Story of an
American Family assembled a multi-
racial family tree. Her grandmother,
born a house slave in North Carolina,
was the biological daughter of her white
master, and Murray’s book proved an
important precursor for Alex Haley’s
Roots.From the Algonquin to the Zuni, in-
digenous peoples in the US possess
a richly complex array of beliefs and
knowledge surrounding their ances-
try. But the federal government’s rap-
idly shifting policies and abrogation
of treaties in the late 1890s threat-
ened to replace such knowledge with
its compendium of tribal “allotment
rolls” and requirements surrounding
“blood quantum,” referring to an indi-
vidual’s percentage of Indian ancestry.
Allotment and blood quanta became
consequential measures affecting the
distribution of land. The Indian Re-
organization Act of 1934 defined an
Indian as someone having at least one-
half Indian blood, and legislation over
the years had the effect of reducing
tribal membership and the amount of
land allotted. Tribal lists omitted those
who refused to comply with enroll-
ment, as well as those of mixed African
American and Indian descent.
Morgan claims that her book is “the
first long history of genealogy in the
United States to incorporate Indige-
nous people’s genealogy practices,” but
the survey, compared to the material
on African Americans, feels shallow.
Speaking of the “segmented nature”
of tribal genealogy and the “decentral-
ized” character of their resources, she
remarks on the dispossession of native
peoples without fully recording how
ancestry and culture were disrupted
by these events. “Such extremes as
government bounties for the mass
slaughter of bison, with which the state
intended to starve out Native resisters,
drew outcries from white reformers,”
she observes, failing to note that there
were bounties not just on bison but
on the scalps of Dakota men, in Min-
nesota, after the US- Dakota War of
1862.
She mentions the high rate of white
families’ “adopting Indigenous chil-
dren” in the 1950s and states that
“mass assimilation and Christianiza-
tion for Native populations in the West
resembled a humane alternative, at
the time,” as if white interpretations
of such policies were exculpatory.
Her brief acknowledgment of “distant
boarding schools” and “government-
ordered family separations” skims the
surface of that long, brutal era, neglect-
ing to recognize the scope of the fed-
eral government’s program of “Indian
schools,” begun in 1860. Designed to
“kill the Indian [and] save the man,”
many were run by churches. Tens of
thousands of Indian children were
seized against their parents’ wishes
and placed in white homes or board-
ing schools, institutions where children
were renamed and beaten for speak-
ing their own languages. Some died of
abuse and neglect, another method ofreducing the amount of land that could
be claimed. In this country, searches
are ongoing for mass graves outside
these “Christian” places; they have
already been found outside residential
schools in Canada.
One institution behind such adop-
tions was the Church of Jesus Christ
of Latter- day Saints (LDS), a fact Mor-
gan also fails to include. For its Indian
Student Placement Program, which
ran between the late 1940s and the
mid- 1990s, the church placed Navajo
children in Mormon homes to work on
their farms, an especially disturbing
development given that the faithful had
long believed that Native Americans
were desc enda nts of “L a ma n ites,” who,
according to the Book of Mormon, re-
belled against God and bore the curse
of a “skin of blackness” and an “evil na-
ture... full of idolatry and filthiness.”
Believing this racist and fictitious ge-
nealogy, Mormons had seen American
Indians as requiring conversion, while
condemning African Americans to an
even lower order. Blacks were specifi-
cally denied the priesthood, the main
source of power and authority within
the church. Spencer W. Kimball, an
elder and later a president of the church,
claimed in 1960 that the skin of Native
American children became “several
shades lighter” after they spent time in
Mormon homes; Kimball was pleased
that Lamanites were abandoning their
“distorted tradition stories.” Morgan
loses an opportunity to examine in de-
tail the widespread destruction of in-
digenous families and the generational
damage wrought by such attempts to
annihilate children’s ancestral knowl-
edge and culture.
Morgan does spend considerable time
on the LDS, however, which has been
assiduously tracking the genealogies of
virtually everyone it could find for well
over a century. Due to the structure of
A Nation of Descendants—organized
less chronologically than thematically,
around exclusion and inclusion—Mor-
mons keep cropping up in the text like
prairie dogs and figure in the book’s
more colorful passages.
The church’s dedication to geneal-
ogy originated in the unusual temple
practice of baptizing the dead, which
began with founder Joseph Smith. His
1836 revelations included instructions
from on high on how to secure his late,
unbaptized brother Alvin’s tardy sal-
vation. Smith limited the practice to
relatives, but within a few years Mor-
mons were baptizing all and sundry,
including George Washington, who
was immersed by proxy in the Missis-
sippi in 1843, forty- four years after his
death. A later prohibition limited such
baptisms to close family members for
seventy years, even as a future church
president reported, in 1918, a vision of
Jesus Christ christening the dead.
Thanks to these preoccupations, the
church became a considerable force in
genealogy, led by the pioneering work
of Susa Young Gates, one of the church
leader Brigham Young’s fifty- six chil-
dren from sixteen wives. One scholar
has suggested that the church’s encour-
agement of genealogy may have been
meant as a “surrogate for plural mar-
riage,” officially abandoned in 1890.
If so, these polygamous energies have
borne prodigious fruit. In 1944 the
church’s Genealogical Society of Utah
opened its archives to everyone, for
free, and the office gradually evolved
from managing a “huge card file” topreserving everything on microfilm. In
the 1950s Brigham Young University
began offering the first college courses
on the topic.
The church loosened its strictures
on proxy baptism of the dead in 1961,
just as American Jews were experi-
encing renewed interest in their her-
itage. Morgan notes the Nazi practice
of using family records to identify
Jews and reports one man asking a re-
searcher if they even had genealogies.
But in this country Jewish families’
post- Holocaust curiosity reached a
heightened pitch with the popularity of
the musical Fiddler on the Roof, which
premiered on Broadway in 1964, a phe-
nomenon that led researchers straight
to the extensive records held in Salt
Lake City.With the publication of Roots: The
Saga of an American Family in 1976,
genealogical fever became a worldwide
phenomenon. Both the book and the
major television series that followed in
1 9 7 7 h a d b e e n p r e s a g e d by H a l ey ’s p o p -
ular lecture series, which he launched
a few years after the 1965 publication
of The Autobiography of Malcolm X,
which he had cowritten. In 1967 Haley
had made two trips to Gambia, where
he asked villagers and a local griot, or
storyteller, about dramatic tales he had
heard as a child from female relatives
about an ancestor, Kunta Kinte, kid-
napped from the banks of the River
Gambia and brought to this country
as a slave, renamed Toby. With the
information Haley learned there, he
believed he had located the direct fa-
milial link to his African forebears,
and his lectures served to build in-
terest and to fund further years of
research.
Primed by prior publicity, Roots
spent five months at the top of the New
York Time s best- seller list, selling 1.5
million copies in hardcover and mil-
lions more in paperback. Airing over
eight consecutive nights in January
1977, the TV show reached an unprec-
edented 130 million people. Black
viewers especially became enraptured
with the possibilities of diaspora nar-
ratives and “roots travel.” It was a wa-
tershed year: the DA R finally admitted
its first African American member,
although it took years to admit an-
other. Apparently God watched Roots
too, because a year and a half after
the show aired, LDS president Kim-
ball reported a revelation that Black
males could now be admitted to the
priesthood.
Morgan dutifully tracks the influ-
ence of Roots over the following years,
as enthusiasm spread to other ethnic
groups and countries. The first Ameri-
can Jewish genealogical society and pe-
riodical were founded shortly after the
book appeared, along with new organi-
zations devoted to Hispanic and Latinx
ancestry. In another baffling omission
for someone chronicling exclusion,
Morgan barely mentions Asian Amer-
icans. Amy Tan’s 1989 novel, The Joy
Luck Club, doubtless served as another
such turning point, exploring ethnic
and cultural identity and the problems
of assimilation.
Morga n is much bet ter on Roots itself
and its complicated afterlife as a high-
profile example of the uses and abuses
of genealogy. The book had been pub-
lished as nonfiction, but gradually re-
viewers and readers raised questionsFraser 23 25 .indd 24 4 / 13 / 22 5 : 53 PM