70 THENEWYORKER,M AY 9, 2022
States, after gardening, and the second
most popular search category online, after
porn. Those claims should be sprinkled
with a few grains of salt, but more than
twenty-six million people have taken ge-
netic ancestry tests since 2012, inciden-
tally creating a database of huge value to
pharmaceutical companies and law en-
forcement. The Silicon Valley-based test-
ing 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 bil-
lion. The genealogical behemoth Ances-
try, which boasts more than three mil-
lion subscribers and the nation’s largest
genetic database, was purchased for $4.7
billion in 2020.
For those not drawn to genealogy, such
an interest can seem “at best, embarrass-
ing, if not a sign of narcissism and piti-
able aspiration,” Maud Newton acknowl-
edges in a candid memoir about her own
genealogical obsession, “Ancestor Trou-
ble” (Random House). But, whatever you
think about genealogy, it has profound
ramifications for you. From the doctor’s
office to the passport office, ancestry in-
flects the social, material, legal, and med-
ical conditions of nearly everybody’s life.
“The stories we tell ourselves about our
ancestors have the power to shape us,”
Newton observes. Why and how this has
come to be has an ancestry of its own.
V
irtually every culture tells a story
about the origins of humankind—a
story about its ancestry. In Norse tradi-
tion, 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. The sacred text
of the K’iche’ Maya people, Popol Vuh,
describes how the creators tried making
human beings from clay, but they crum-
bled 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. The God of the Old
Testament, after making the heavens and
the earth and filling them with birds, an-
imals, and fish, “formed man of the dust
of the ground,” and from the man’s rib
fashioned woman. The origin story that
we tend to believe today describes the
emergence, through evolution, of ana-
tomically modern humans in Africa about
three hundred thousand years ago.
Origin stories provide collective ac-
counts of where “we” come from, but
they also help some lineages claim power
over others. Ruling dynasties often
boasted of sacred or supernatural an-
cestors. Egyptian pharaohs styled them-
selves sons of Amun-Ra, and Chinese
emperors were “sons of heaven.” Inca
emperors traced their pedigree to the
sun, Roman rulers to Venus, and Mer-
ovingians to a sea monster. The “begats”
of the Old Testament reflected the im-
portance of lineage as a basis for au-
thority in the ancient Near East. 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 Abra-
ham. 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 in-
terpreted, controversially, as justifying
the development of caste.
“Maybe it was inevitable that hu-
mans would choose to explain the order
of things to themselves in this way,”
Newton says. But the near-universality
of hierarchies based on ancestry makes
it all the more important to consider
who gets to define genealogical knowl-
edge, record it, and access it. Before the
print and digital eras, genealogical rec-
ords overwhelmingly resided with re-
ligious and kin-based authorities: in the
tablets of Chinese ancestral halls and
the lineage books (jokbo) kept by el-
dest sons in Korean families; among
the reciters of Maori lineages (whaka-
papa) and the griots of West Africa,
who sing the histories of dynasties; in
the baptism registers of the Catholic
Church and the lists of births and deaths
kept by Hindu pandas. In Europe, the
“family tree,” which had its own roots
in early-medieval representations of the
lineage of Jesus, emerged by the six-
teenth century as the dominant meta-
phor for genealogy.
The expansion of European empires
in the early-modern era imposed the
genealogical priorities of Western Eu-
rope on countless other populations.
One especially consequential strand can
be traced to fifteenth-century Spain,
where, following the mass conversions
of Jews and Muslims to Christianity,
“purity of blood” (limpieza de sangre)
statutes were passed to ferret out “New
Christians” and keep them from hold-
ing public or religious offices. Trans-
planted to the Americas after 1492, the
Iberian obsession with genealogical pu-
rity informed the development of a
sistema de castas, as scholars have termed
it, that stratified colonial populations
according to their proportions of white,
Black, and Indian ancestry. The Portu-
guese brought the freighted term casta
to India, where it was picked up by En-
glish speakers to describe the descent-
based groups they found there.
Starting in the eighteenth century,
genealogical authority increasingly
shifted from religious and family fig-
ures to government officials who cer-
tify births, license marriages, decree di-
vorces, register deaths, and probate wills.
Identity documents emerged in tandem
with typically spurious theories advanced
by practitioners of “race science” and by
ethno-nationalists about the ancestral
origins of various human populations—
one of which persists, shockingly, in the
use of “Caucasian” as a synonym for
“white.” Legal codes granted and re-
stricted citizenship and civil rights on
the basis of ancestry, resulting in the
United States’ “one drop” rule, exclusion
acts, and immigration quotas tied to
“national origins.” A pair of Supreme
Court rulings about naturalization
played on pseudoscientific associations
between ancestry and race. In 1922, the
Court determined that the Japanese im-
migrant Takao Ozawa could not be-
come a U.S. citizen because he was not
ancestrally “Caucasian,” and therefore
was not white; in 1923, it held that the
North Indian immigrant Bhagat Singh
Thind—who, according to the race sci-
ence of the period, was Aryan and thus
Caucasian—could not naturalize, ei-
ther, because he didn’t look “white.”
Today, geneticists have emerged as
authorities on ancestry, replacing “blood”
with DNA. Even before the word “gene”
was coined—sharing a Greek root with
“genealogy”—to describe the biologi-
cal units of heredity, Francis Galton
came up with the term “eugenics” to
promote human improvement by means
of selective breeding. It’s hard to over-
state the international appeal of eugen-
ics in the early twentieth century, in-
