was founded, in Boston, Mormons had
performed more than fifteen thousand
proxy baptisms, including at least four
for George Washington.
Completing “temple work” on behalf
of ancestors required researching and
transcribing genealogies, a pursuit in
which Mormons were aided by the prov-
idential (as they saw it) expansion of
state-administered record-keeping. In
1894, the Church president Wilford
Woodruff enjoined members “to trace
their genealogies as far as they can, and
to be sealed to their fathers and moth-
ers.” The Church-sponsored Genealog-
ical Society of Utah was established a
few months later, coinciding with a spate
of lineage organizations founded by
white, Protestant, self-styled “Anglo-
Saxons”—including the Daughters of
the American Revolution (1890) and the
General Society of Mayflower Descen-
dants (1897)—in the face of surging im-
migration from Southern and Eastern
Europe. The Church, as Francesca Mor-
gan observes in a perceptive history of
genealogy in the United States, “A Na-
tion of Descendants” (North Carolina),
has long held that “the more people—
Mormon or not—engaged in geneal-
ogy, the closer everyone drew to fulfill-
ing God’s plan.” But Mormons were also
taught that Blacks were the cursed de-
scendants of Cain. The Church began
admitting Black men into the priest-
hood only in 1978, a year after Brigham
Young University granted an honorary
degree to Alex Haley, crediting the pub-
lication of his book “Roots” with “gen-
erating more interest in genealogy than
any other event in American history.”
The Genealogical Society of Utah is
now known as FamilySearch, and run
by the Church as a nonprofit. But in 1996
two B.Y.U. graduates seized a commer-
cial opportunity by launching a genea-
logical Web site that put up searchable,
digitized versions of public databases like
the Social Security Death Index. In the
early two-thousands, the company part-
nered with a pioneering genetic-testing
firm that was founded by another Mor-
mon entrepreneur, and in 2013 it signed
a deal with FamilySearch to digitize a
billion of the Church’s volunteer-indexed
records. Joining the projects of state, sci-
ence, and salvation, the company’s name
is, simply, Ancestry.O
ur engagement with ancestry spans
the spiritual, material, political,
and biological realms, each of which
has its own technologies and authori-
ties. As a result, our laws, institutions,and imaginations are poorly prepared
to deal with the contradictions that
arise when one kind of evidence, like a
DNA test, contradicts another, like a
family story. Such tensions provide fer-
tile ground for memoirs and magazine
features, but the situation gets murkier
when it comes to privacy, social justice,
and national politics.
As the American liberal élite unites
around a commitment to “trusting sci-
ence,” it is especially sobering to con-
sider the implications of handing over
the authority to define ancestry to ge-
neticists. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., among
others, has spoken eloquently about the
power of genetic ancestry tests to re-
veal African American family history
hidden behind the “brick wall” of 1870,
before which enslaved people were not
recorded by name in federal censuses.
Such tests can be of immense personal
significance, especially for those whose
access to other forms of genealogical
knowledge has been destroyed or im-
peded. Yet the relationship of race, an-
cestry, and genetics has been tortured
at best. Critics worry that genetic tests
can reaffirm the idea that there’s a bi-
ological essence to given populations,
from which percentages of descent can
be calculated; “mixture,” the Indigenous-
studies scholar Kim TallBear says, “is
predicated on purity.”
Using “ancestry” in place of “race” or
“ethnicity” (as is becoming increasingly
widespread) may sidestep some prob-
lems, but it opens up others. The truth
is, all genealogies are selective, often by
design. Kinship terms and naming prac-
tices single out certain family members
as more consequential than others. Most
traditions of ancestor veneration regard
only some of the dead as having power
over the living, and commemorate just
those figures accordingly. Even genetic
tests offer selective accounts of a per-
son’s ancestry. Owing to the random
process of recombination, the chances
are vanishingly small that any given
person has inherited detectable auto-
somal DNA from a specific progenitor
more than eight generations ago. We
know that “race” is a social construct.
We need to acknowledge the ways in
which “ancestry” is, too.
Maud Newton has a keen appreci-
ation for the fictive quality of stories
“ You just had to Yelp this place, didn’t you?” about ancestry. As she relates in “An-