THENEWYORKER,M AY9, 2022 69
Behind slickly packaged Web sites and DNA kits lurk tacit assumptions about the fixity of status, race, and ethnicity.
ACRITIC AT LARGE
ANCESTOR WORSHIP
Where does the craze for genealogy come from?BY M AYA JASANOFF
ILLUSTRATION BY JO ZIXUAN
A
mile into Utah’s Little Cotton-
wood Canyon, heading east from
Salt Lake City toward the Wasatch ski
slopes, several concrete arches open into
the face of a mountain. Behind doors
designed to withstand a nuclear strike,
through tunnels blasted six hundred
feet into the rock, in a vault that’s an-
other seven hundred feet down, lies a
trove stashed in steel cases: not bullion
or jewels but microfilm, millions of reels
of it. They contain billions of images
of genealogical documents, an estimated
quarter of all vital records on earth. 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.“You hardly meet an American who
does not want to be connected a bit by
his birth to the first settlers of the colo-
nies, and, as for branches of the great
families of England, America seemed to
me totally covered by them,” Alexis de
Tocqueville marvelled in 1840. It’s often
said that genealogical research is the sec-
ond most popular hobby in the United