May 12, 2022 25about its historical accuracy.* Haley
came to refer to his work as “faction”
(a mixture of fact and fiction) or “the
saga, of us as a people,” acknowledging
that dialogue and other elements had
been fictionalized. In addition, there
were lawsuits based on accusations of
plagiarism. Morgan assiduously un-
tangles these scandals but also points
out that, for most readers, they hardly
seemed to matter. For many African
Americans, Roots in all its forms fed an
insatiable hunger to know their origins
and, as one educator put it, “helped de-
stroy the chilling ignorance of who we
are as a people.”
The reach of Roots was such that the
National Archives and the LDS genea-
logical holdings were mobbed with
seekers from all over the world. So
it was inevitable that the church’s re-
newed taste for proxy baptisms of the
dead would come to light, as it did in
1993, when Gary Mokotoff, the pub-
lisher of a prominent Jewish genealog-
ical magazine, discovered that Anne
Frank and others who had perished in
the Holocaust were baptized posthu-
mously. He declared such acts “partic-
ularly repugnant to Jews,” subjected
for centuries to forcible conversions.
The church banned the practice again
in 1995, but Mormons keep doing it,
recently splashing out to net the grand-
parents of Donald Trump and Hillary
Clinton.Genealogy has now been radically
transformed by digitization, elevating
it to a commercial powerhouse, its re-
sources increasingly available to all. In
1990 two graduates of Brigham Young
University began selling LDS publica-
tions on floppy disks from the back seat
of their car. By 1996 they launched a
website, Ancestry.com. Now boasting
more than three million paying sub-
scribers in thirty countries, the company
brings in over $1 billion in annual reve-
nue. It was sold to a private equity firm
in August 2020 for $4.7 billion. Since
1999 the LDS church has operated a
nonprofit search engine, FamilySearch.
org, offering access to many of the same
sources as Ancestry for free.
A major difference between the two
services is that Ancestry.com sells DNA
home- testing kits, whose results can be
incorporated into family trees on the
site. According to Bloomberg Law,
some 18 million people are represented
in Ancestry.com’s DNA network. Mil-
lions more have availed themselves
of other tests, such as those sold by
23andMe, and the data collected on
multiple sites have corrected the record
on historical figures, identified long-
sought criminals and human remains,
and startled any number of customers
who have learned hitherto unimagined
facts about their families.
Among the most notable of DNA rev-
elations concerned Thomas Jefferson.
For decades, despite rumors and resem-
blances, historians adamantly denied
that he could have fathered children
with Sally Hemings, his house slave
and the half- sister of his deceased wife.
In 1997 the historian and law profes-
sor Annette Gordon- Reed published
Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings:
An American Controversy, assemblingand examining ample textual evidence
for the connection. The following year,
Nature published an article on DNA
results from putative male descendants
of the pair showing, in Morgan’s words,
“a very high probability of biological
relatedness.”
That’s the kind of gasp- inducing dis-
closure sought by DNA reality shows,
the most beloved of which stars the
Harvard professor Henry Louis Gates
Jr. Beginning with African American
Lives (2006 and 2008) and moving on
to Faces of America (2010) and Finding
Your Root s (2012–present), Gates has
featured celebrities being presented
with “books of life” telling the story of
their ancestors, assembled by teams of
experts in genealogy and DNA. Gates
talks his subjects through the pages, in-
evitably reaching a dramatic “reveal.”
Oprah Winfrey learned, for example,
that a great- grandfather, an illiterate
man named Constantine Winfrey, re-
ceived eighty acres of prime Georgia
farmland from a white man, in ex-
change for growing and picking eight
bales of cotton, or more than three
thousand pounds, within two years.
Morgan sneers at “entertainers’ traf-
ficking in emotions,” as if emotion were
fentanyl, discussing Gates in the same
tone with which she describes Maury
Povich, the trashy talk show host of the
1990s infamous for outing deadbeat
dads with DNA tests. In some ways
her skepticism is justified, since Gates
had to apologize in 2015 after bowing
to pressure from Ben Affleck to delete
material documenting that an ances-
tor of his owned slaves, an anecdote
she does not include. The popularity
and influence of Gates’s shows—which
at their best provide an accessible in-
duction into American history—make
them relevant to her discussion. Yet she
devotes as much space to a genealogi-
cal episode of SpongeBob SquarePants
as to what Gates has done, missing the
point of both his shows and contempo-
rary genealogy as a whole. Americans
desperately want stories about their
past, and it was presumably the job of
this book to ask why.
If anything, genealogy thwarts our
emotional needs, revealing only frag-
ments of a story. The data are, almost
inevitably, scant and narratively disap-
pointing. There are revelations to be
had, but barring letters or diaries to
flesh out the tale, seekers are often left
holding a skein of tantalizing connec-
tive tissue, nothing like a complete cor-
pus. As Haley put it, we have “a hunger,
bone- marrow deep, to know our heri-
tage...a hollow yearning...a vacuum,
and emptiness, and the most disquiet-
ing loneliness.”
For most of us, we’ll never receive
a tidy “book of life,” padded with his-
torical stuffing, like those on Gates’s
shows, because genealogy is elusive, ex-
pensive (in time and money), and frus-
trating. We may be able to trace our
ancestors’ DNA, but we can’t know or
recreate in much depth the motivations
or behaviors of our great- great- great-
grandparents, any more than we can
know those of William the Conqueror
or Adam or Eve. In that sense, Roots
remains a discomfiting example of that
yearning we feel, looking back across
time, and the fictional extremes it may
inspire. It took a creative writer to fill
in the unbridgeable gaps and breathe
life into characters who had, by the
time their belated author came along,
succumbed to the void. Q*See Willie Rose Lee, “An American
Family,”
, Novem-
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