 Greetings from the National Archives flagship building in Washington, D.C., which sits on the ancestral lands of the Nacotch tank peoples. I'm David Ferriero, Archivist of the United States, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to today's conversation with Francesca Morgan about her new book, A Nation of Descendants, which looks at how genealogy has been used by specific groups and how its use has changed over time. Before we begin, I'd like to tell you about two programs that you can view later this month on our YouTube channel. On Friday, October 22nd at noon, NASA astronaut Nicole Stott will discuss her work on the International Space Station and share insights from scientists, activists, and change makers who are working to solve our greatest environmental challenges. Her new book is Back to Earth. And on Wednesday, October 27th at 1 p.m., Nathaniel Philbrick will discuss Travels with George, his new book that recounts his own modern-day journey based on George Washington's presidential excursions. In the late 1970s, National Archives research rooms saw a surge in new researchers inspired by Alex Ailey's book and television show Roots. They searched for their own family links, not necessarily defined an illustrious ancestor, but to discover where they came from and to understand their place in history. Those who come to the National Archives to search for family connections usually start with census records which show us individuals, families, and neighborhoods, pinpointing a specific line on the form identifies a person and looking at the whole page and its surrounding pages gives a snapshot of the community in which they lived. In less than six months, on April 1st, 2022, we'll open the 1950 census and get a look at another historical slice of America. Censuses may be the entry point, but the National Archives researchers also sift through records documenting immigration and naturalization, military and civilian service, bankruptcies, taxation, schools, and much more. Many of these records are available online at the National Archives website and through our digital partners. And as any researcher can tell you, being able to make a personal connection to one of the millions of stories contained in these records is a feeling like no other. Francesca Morgan is Associate Professor of History at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago and author of Women in Patriotism in Jim Crow America. Her research interests include the history of genealogy in the United States since 1800. Joining Francesca Morgan in conversation is Karen Wolf, who is Historian of 18th Century British America. Her research focuses on gender, family, and political culture. Her latest book, Lineage, Genealogy and the Power of Connection in British America, is forthcoming from Oxford University Press. Now let's hear from Francesca Morgan and Karen Wolf. Thank you for joining us today. Hello. Thank you all so much for being with us and thank you to the National Archives and to the Archivist for that very warm welcome. Francesca, it is wonderful to be in conversation with you. We have talked about your research over years and it's delightful to see this marvelous book, actually, and to hold it and to read it. So congratulations to you, first of all. Thank you. I thought we would just start with talking a little bit about genealogy itself. That is, what is genealogy and why is it so popular? And tell us a little bit about genealogy's popularity and then we'll dig into some of the themes of the book. All right. Well, to make a long story short, you would answer this question differently depending on where we are in history and what culture we're in, but I can say with confidence that in modern times, genealogy in many ways is an interstate highway leading to history. It's for people who just love explorations of the past, but it also speaks volumes about our present, our identities as individuals. And of course, in my book, I get very involved with genealogy's meanings for all sorts of group boundaries and group sorting and all these different things. I'm going to keep my answer short because I want to allow time for as many questions as I can. Karen, I can spend the rest of the hour on your question, but I think I'm going to look it there. I hear you. I hear you. Well, it is phenomenal, really, the popularity of genealogy, even if we just think about the space that it has taken up in libraries, if we think about the volume of publications devoted to genealogy, if we think about the space on the Internet or in the world of entertainment now that genealogy is occupying. It's really an extraordinary phenomenon. And I think, you know, your book talks, though, about not just genealogy's popularity or how it is for Americans today, but about the history of genealogy. So tell us a little bit about how genealogy actually has a history. That is, it's not just a practice that is kind of obvious and that people just set out and do, but that it actually has its own history. Tell us a little bit about that. You're so right. The modernity popularity of genealogy, including online, is very characteristic of our historical moment and what can I say? It's a very, very, very old habit. And as you noticed, a worldwide habit, if you will, in nations and civilizations of all that you can think of, it takes a lot, it takes a big effort not to see all the ways genealogy operated in the past or to have an impression of it. You know, you can point to medieval Europe. You can point to Confucianism in China. All sorts of things. And I can say more about the past and the present in the United States. If you want me to, but in the meantime, I'm going to go on to your next question, you know, as go back and go further in depth on any of these points. So one of the things that you say in your book is that not only does genealogy have a history that we can explore through the history of genealogical institutions or genealogical kind of cultural phenomena, but you also say that there is a political dimension to genealogy. Can you talk a little bit about what you mean by the politics of genealogy? I mean, it's right there in your title. Politics. Right there. Nation of descendants. Politics in the practice of genealogy in U.S. history. Can you talk a little bit about that? Right. Well, I define the word politics very broadly. Not just the working of governmental institutions. I have a lot about laws and so forth, depending on genealogy, record keeping and chapter one, but politics also means very broadly the workings of power. I talk about social hierarchies of all kinds, as well as challenges to all sorts of social hierarchies. I'm thinking very broadly race, class, gender, particular religious minorities, particular ethnic groups, and I could go just on and on. But yes, I'm especially interested in genealogy, as I said, as sort of all the ways that it keeps and weakens group boundaries and all the ways that it seals hierarchies of all sorts socially. Okay. So if genealogy has a history and there is a kind of political dimension to that history in the United States, which is the focus of your book, let's talk a little bit about how American genealogy is. That is that what is this specifically American-ness in your book? If genealogy is a practice that across time and space, there aren't a lot of things that historians like to think about as trans-historical, but genealogical practice seems to be one of them. But what is it that's so American about what you've captured here about this modern history of genealogy? Absolutely. The things that are characteristically American about genealogy practice in the U.S. going way back is that all the ways that it reconstituted are social hierarchies in the wake of the American Revolution where we supposedly did away with hereditary forms of government. Think about aristocrats. Think about monarchs inheriting their position. Supposedly we did away with all of that, but there's a whole number of ways that authority is replaced, especially in everyday social life. I noticed another one of your questions was about genealogy cultures in republics that don't have aristocrats right there with their family crests. That really flows into the question of genealogy in the United States. Another thing I want to say about distinctively American forms of genealogy is that this country has been a world leader in what I'm going to call genealogy for profit, genealogy businesses, genealogy as a vocation, as a career, as a hobby, and especially in the last 30 years. There's relatively new and recent form of mass genealogy commerce, and genealogy as entertainment on screen and also everything that tourists do when they're on route trips, not to mention all the ways this appears on your reality show. All of that is, it's so American. And I can go on from there on another thing that I think I can say is characteristically American is as genealogy businesses and commercialized forms of genealogy go from small to big from corner over here to mass. We have an anti-commercial backlash of sorts that takes the form of scholarly genealogy and that's still around today. Another word for that genre within genealogy practice is professional. I tend to use the word professional for them. It isn't just career genealogists, but there really is a sense of a professional than something that must be taught and adherence to primary documents. You might think, what's anti-commercial about that? Well, as we say among historians, are we doing the past for its own sake? Are we trying to foster empathy with the very different ways of thinking in the past? Or are we looking at the past in a way that will serve the present? Are we finding congenial values in the past of the sort that we want to reinforce in the present day, all the ways that interpretations of the past can serve the present? So anyhow, with professionals, we find history for its own sake. Among business people, because their clients is the descendant, certainly we find many instances of studies of the past deployed to serve the needs of the present, and I would dare say the market. Again, I'm seeing meanings of America all over that. Both things. Yeah, that's so interesting. Let me go back and ask you to pick up one of those threads. You say in the book that there is this kind of notion of the American character forged in the revolution, anti-monarchical. The American Revolution is the triumph of individualism over hereditary government. So it is the American Patriots against King George and the monarchy. And the notion is that Americans have a kind of spirit and ethic of individualism, that it matters who you are individually and not where you come from, not what your family background is. And you say in the book that it's striking that not just in the United States, but elsewhere, the genealogy seems to be most robust, not in countries or societies where heredity still really matters governmentally, but in republics and democracies. So can you talk about that a little bit? That seems really contradictory. Why would there be so much investment in hereditary background in places where, you know, the democratic ethos suggests that it matters. The individual is what matters, not the family background. One would think that my two second, my shorter answer to your very rich question is to say once again, in republics and democracies that have experienced that kind of revolution, and we can apply this all over North America anyway, I think it's safe to say that in the absence of hereditary government, group hierarchies of all sorts get reinscracked. And I don't need to tell you or my audience all the ways that some of these hierarchies, and this is kind of different, are thought of in a hereditary way. Race is something said to be inherited, for example. So you look around in these republics and you find all of these other institutions in both government and outside government that reinscribe heredity. Another thing from the U.S. history, enslavement, slavery, that's hereditary through the mother in a country where supposedly, Thomas Jefferson said the dead have no rights. The Tocqueville remarked on all the ways Democrats sever themselves from the past, always contradictory on this point. Yeah, I could go on, but that's a really good question and I can answer it for later times. Okay, so let me press you on another, and we will absolutely are going to come back to the question about slavery and race and how that plays a role in the history and politics of genealogy. But let me press you on another very American dimension, which is Latter-day Saints and the importance of Latter-day Saints and the Mormon Church in fostering not just genealogical consciousness and practice, but also genealogical institutions. Can you talk about that a little bit too, because that's a very American phenomenon that then has a very global impact. Made in the USA, but since 1996, there have been more Latter-day Saints outside the United States than inside American export, if you will, in so many ways. Yes, to answer your question, within this realm that I just described of the American Republic where social differences get reinscribed, within the history of Mormonism, very, very early, literally starting with Joseph Smith, the founder of the religion and the church. There's this spiritual, I would say virtual form of outreach to the dead to garner more souls. As a worshipper, you have to show that you've done this outreach for the dead. The church doesn't claim knowledge about whether the dead person responds and accepts baptism or not. But anyhow, there's this basic obligation in the course of worship, this basic temporal ceremony where you fill this obligation to evangelize the dead. And this importance of reaching out to the dead to your fate in the afterlife has been a tremendous motivating character, a tremendous motivation and grows your numbers and grows your commitment to institutions within the church, institutional commitments towards record keeping, and I'm talking about the massive index card file that became that massive cave full of microfilm negatives and nowadays massive digital holdings on familysearch.org. We pass through the generations, we see a change in scale, but it really builds on a very old tendency that when we take even a casual look at the business history of genealogy, every time we see, not every time, but every time since 1945 where we've seen a bigger business than before, we can point to founders of a business and a lot of the people of patronize the business as having Latter-day Saints, roots or some kind of affiliation. Ancestry Inc., which later became Ancestry.com was started in the early 80s, 1980s to a couple of young, recent graduates of Brigham Young University, which is the church's university. So, yeah, both in and outside the church, including in private life where there are businesses, we see that. So important, let me just ask you to expand even a little bit more on that because the influence of the Latter-day Saints I think is so significant and for anybody who is doing genealogical research online, which is how most people are encountering that research now, whether it's FamilySearch or Ancestry.com, they're influenced by those, you know, that century plus of genealogical record keeping and research and aggregation. So can you talk a little bit about, you talked about Joseph Smith and his first vision and how that influenced ideas about baptism of the dead and baptizing ancestors into the church, but also Wilford Woodruff is so important in the later 19th century and really comes into the story in a powerful way that you tell about the influence of Mormonism and American genealogy. Okay, just to modify something very quickly what you said, if there are experts or people deeply knowledgeable of Latter-day Saints out there, this was not in the first vision in particular, this was in, I'm safe to say, the second or third or very early vision with the, sorry, angelic visit and the talk of the dead brother. Okay, sorry to cut to the chase here on the rest of the question. Wilford Woodruff, I remind you, as president of the church in the 1890s after decades and decades of being a missionary and so many other things to say, being church president and within the Church of the Life, Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is like being a pope. It's a quite hierarchical priesthood setup within the church and this bears in what I'm gonna say next. It's with his presidency that the church begins its commitment to genealogy institutions focusing on amassing information about earthly relations. We see a new explicit talk of getting your relations to your living and dead relatives who are family to you sealed. That becomes explicit. Why does it become explicit in the 1890s? It's when the church ceases its practice of spiritual adoption. I'm happy to say there's some new work coming out. Megan Stanton, if you're out there and give me a shout on the church's practices of spiritual adoptions which I can talk about more but as the adoptions cease to grow, the church stops its practice it turns to this much more explicit talk of sealing yourself to the biological we might say the blood relatives that you have. And there's some wonderful quotations from Woodruff. So Woodruff, his presidency marks the turning point where we start to see the very first array of genealogy institutions and instruction and genealogy columns in the Latter-day Saints newspaper, the Deseret News, and it goes on from there. Lots to say about these different stages in the 20th century. Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So let's talk a little bit more about something you raised earlier just briefly which is about the significance of race and the institution of slavery in particular and how that's played a role in American genealogical thinking. And I know these are actually separate, one can hold these concepts separately that is slavery and what the institution of slavery did to later practice for or against later practices of genealogical research and also American ideas about race which seem to pervade genealogy as you argue in the book and as you show whether we're talking about African-Americans or other groups, ideas about race just seem to pervade American genealogical practice. So can you talk about both of those, both slavery and race? Be as brief as I can but it's safe to say I can easily take the rest of the hour on the first question. So important. These are deep and profound questions. Right. Absolutely to preview what I say in the book about and the descendants of enslaved people doing genealogy there are particular ways that enslavement what am I trying to say suppressed record keeping and all these other things that genealogists depend on to trace individual and family identities. There are these just these particular gross violations of Victorian 19th century norms of kinship to talk about. I remind you that slavery and traced inheritance through the mother if your mother was enslaved you were too and removed all. What word am I looking for? Responsibility and kinship from the biological father and that feature alone incentivized or literally it created a situation where it paid the owner every time and the slave woman got pregnant and there's a lot to say there. So I'm just going to leave what I say about enslavement there's a lot more to say that modern day people who research African-American ancestry often portray the 1870 US census as the brick wall they use that expression the brick wall because before that sorry the 1870 federal census is the first one taken after slavery was outlawed in 1865 and before 1870 the federal census listed enslaved people I think but it was dear me it's been a while since I looked at this material but it's basically maybe we get as specific as their ages their numbers, their gender but never names and you depend on names when you do genealogy research okay about race ideas about race to make a long story short you look for there are these characteristics where race is inherited race depends on documentation and so indeed there are all these ways that starting in the late 19th century and I would say extending very well into nowadays genealogy gets deployed to reinforce and enforce racial boundaries we see that with Jim Crow in the south and all the cruelties that happen to African-Americans once enslavement is outlawed once slavery is outlawed we see this especially in Indian country with all the forms that colonization takes and again this is just a little preview of the book but there's genealogy practice in itself is not racial on its face and there's a very strong kinship all through the 20th century all through the different phases of the civil rights movement where we see civil rights activists including really pivotal figures like W. E. B. Du Bois taking up genealogy along with history and it really is a profound form of resistance against white supremacy for in the end for an African-American to trace their black ancestry and their white ancestry to some of them back right so there's a lot more to say that I see in my book about race and race features in all the chapters it's really complicated because it seems like you're often talking about what individuals are doing to explore their own family background but you're also talking about broad patterns and also institutions and organizations that have particular commitments you use the phrase white supremacy to talk about in the late 19th and early 20th century so can you just address that a little bit what are some of the organizations that you would say are actually in that period using genealogy to advance white supremacy that's right well I can point to particular laws but in the interest of time the groups that I most have in mind for the late 19th century that really signify these broader developments are the emergence of those daughters and dames and sons and hereditary groups in general in the late 19th century in the genealogy community they often refer to these groups as patriotic groups or hereditary groups and of course there's a whole lot to say about the relationship between genealogy activity and patriotism but why do these groups what do these groups have to do with white supremacy these things are very different with them they're making these various commitments to expanding the immemoration in particular of black and brown people and diversifying within themselves or they're starting that process so it's a lot to say but when they first emerge they truly exist as a way to certify whiteness in part because the features of genealogy at that time that are documented on documentation and the whole act of documenting your ancestors and finding them in the archive depends on all sorts of class and race privileges both for your ancestor and yourself and 100 years ago much more than now the kinds of documents that archives and historical societies collected were much more about let's say white people and the elite when I say white by the way that's a sliding concept I'm talking about a time period 100 years ago where the term white meant a particular kind of European the people that nowadays might refer to as WASPs and white Anglo-Saxon Protestant and my book I make reference to them as white Anglo-Americans it takes a while and I thank you Nell Painter it takes a while for white people it takes a while for European descent to equal white that's a sliding concept but yes Karen those institutions I would really start off and pointing to are these hereditary groups that emerge in the Gilded Age they emerge in the 1890s and 1900s instead of 1918s as well and they don't go away and they're dynamic they keep changing and so yes to for for the original question the American Revolution why what is it about these adults that build being a daughter or a son or a dame into their social identity I thought we weren't supposed to care about the past and breaking forward as revolutionaries and of course lighting up for the territory of the American West I could go on and on but I will be glad to handle your next question I think what's helpful about what you set out there in terms of some of these hereditary societies like the Daughters of the American Revolution the Sons of the American Revolution, Colonial Dames so on that in their late 19th century iteration that kind of emphasis on whiteness and white heredity particularly genealogy as a kind of resistance activity a kind of a resistance both to the decimation of knowledge about African American families in the long period of slavery and also as a resistance to the kind of ideas about race and family and belonging that is being put forward by these organizations so I think that's a really helpful context there for us to see genealogy as a kind of resistance activity reclaiming family connections and that sort of leads me to my next question about something the archivist referred to which is the 1970s what we think of as the kind of roots phenomenon first of all can you talk a little bit about what is the roots phenomenon and then I have a very specific question for you to follow up about that so let's talk a little bit about Alex Haley's roots what it was and kind of what it meant to genealogy in America roots was Alex Haley's best selling book he called it a saga and a few months after the book was published it was a miniseries it was an eight night TV show and both the book and the TV show were about the previous seven generations of Alex Haley's ancestry he claimed to both name and know the full story of his enslaved ancestor who was originally kidnapped from West Africa out of the Mandinka tribe I'm pronouncing that correctly and so that was Haley's claim and the story goes all through Kuntekente's descendants particular enslaved people also emancipated people blacksmith Tom Murray that's a very high status and skilled job and so you have these among other things black businessmen like this and the story chicken George okay I can name names it's quite the 1970s version it's quite melodramatic and it's a fine show and I understand in the history channel there's a reboot from 2016 and one thing roots imparted to its audiences is a very explicit portrayal of the middle passage of the slave ship the dying and the gross atrocities taking place aboard slave ships and this is on network television at a time when like I say these portrayals of Africans as well as African-Americans as main characters driving the story are just very very rare so okay what did roots do for the history of genealogy the reason why roots found this unanticipated popularity and surprise network executives at a hard time believing that this audience this TV audience of its majority white people at a time would watch roots and such numbers and generate such ratings roots built on trends that were already there and exploded them afterwards wherein we have warts and all genealogy like you all pointed out in the intro we're at a point in time after 1945 well it's like a big slow trend where your ancestors are and you embrace them and you want to know more about them because they're part of you and you have a come as you are attitude towards your ancestors you don't sort of filter among them to find the successful ones are the ones that most appeal to you and the reason why I call it warts and all is that I encountered a woman in the 1970s who started this group about the gangster family and I had thought she wanted to reach out to other people with what she called criminals in their family tree to kind of foster research on them you know she wasn't ashamed of the ancestor she called a gangster she wanted to magnify the knowledge of course it's the time where the godfather movies are out Bonnie and Clyde and everything like this I could go on and on but that's the moment we're talking about and as everything to do with the beginnings of social history of the sort of histories being done of immigrants and working people and people of color and women of all sorts you are doing social history when you're looking at very elite and very well-advantaged women this period is very fertile one for that and that's definitely the value of the genealogy boom there's a real commitment to finding your female ancestor even your maternal lineage which can be a real job to this day even when we're talking about white families that leave a lot of records everything to do with immigrants looking up their roots and trying to throw off this expectation of conforming wasp culture that was so characteristic in the 1920s 30s 40s I could go on so the roots moment it begins and inspires roots I would say Haley's all the work that Alex Haley did in terms of writing roots was itself expressive of the roots phenomenon but afterwards we see an increase in scale and we see a qualitative increase institution building among more and more groups I have an extensive history in my book of all the building of institutions in the United States and now this is all over the world they're in Moscow and even in Germany we have Jewish genealogical societies and that's another American export I have lost to say about the first ever the first time African-American genealogists come together in the United States the first time African-American genealogists come together in organizations with chapters the Afro-American Historical and Genealogical Society and this journal there's a lot to say it comes about in the 1970s and 80s and it's still going of course there's lots of manuals and things and lots of energy surrounding this very difficult field of genealogy and the institutional expression comes after roots first ever Hispanic slash Latin X genealogy conferences happen in the late 70s early 80s no doubt inspired by roots to turn it into an institution I see it in Texas in particular Austin area we have some very active well they self-identify as Hispanic genealogists at that time I could on and on the Irish-American, Polish-American ethnic minorities of all sorts you name it and I say minority because at that time it's more debatable nowadays whether these groups truly we're actually a minority anymore but I think it's fair to use it for the 1970s yeah thank you so much that roots moment that you describe as both accumulation of some phenomena and also then producing an explosion of new phenomenon really really interesting to see roots as pivotal not just as kind of entirely fresh and new and one thing I wanted to ask you about which was really wonderful to read in your book is about the remarkable lawyer civil rights activist Polly Murray and her book proud shoes where she writes in a very different vein from Haley about her family background her African descended family and also native descended family so I wanted to ask you about Polly Murray's proud shoes and how we might think of that as a kind of forerunner to roots and the roots phenomenon I love to talk about that Polly Murray is known for many things and to make a long story short she published proud shoes 20 years before roots with a commercial press and the reason why I consider this particular work of hers among all the other things that she did the reason I consider this work so important in the history of the roots ethos is that she was you know mixed race growing up as African American and you know lots of civil rights activism to talk about for both her and the aunts the three aunts that raised her and so this is a family history of her mother's side going back generations into enslavement and a painful story that's all too common of the white biological father who is also the master the slave owner of her grandmother and this is all in North Carolina in the area around Chapel Hill why do I see this as anticipating roots it's because both Polly Murray and later on Alex Haley reached back to research multiracial family trees and of course we're to point in American history where mixed race person who has black ancestry tends to grow up as African American with the rest of the society identifying them as African American so I know it's a complicated question but anyhow with both of them we find family trees made up of people of different races African American and white and indigenous in many ways and you know her book also had very I would say explicit presentations of slavery's both slavery's atrocities and all the ways that people survived and built themselves up her Polly Murray's grandfather was a civil war veteran I believe having come from a free black background but she has a lot to say about the African American soldier who fought for the union in the American civil war okay I'm getting off on a tangent here I must say I think a Polly Murray tangent is always a good tangent but absolutely there's no documentary on her that I haven't had a chance to watch yet but what I want to just say about Polly Murray's importance in my own book is that I wanted to set down proud shoes in the history of genealogy it deserves a place she was ambivalent about whether to sort of call herself a genealogist and she kind of moved on to other things because she had all those different careers again commenting on her proud shoes and retrospect when Roots came out and so she's part of a broader picture of the research I do on African Americans doing genealogy before Roots this is a place to bring an intersectional theory if you're interested in that and that we don't have to look too closely to see that these are people in the black middle class typically highly educated but be that as it may when they step into the street they're black in America and there's a lot to say Sonya I wanted to set down Polly Murray in all the ways that the Roots set of ethos developed to inspire and fuel Roots so another thing that I think is interesting about your situating Polly Murray's proud shoes there that makes one think of so many things of different ways that people think about lineages and the way that she is thinking about the lineages of her mother's sisters and she's thinking about that in what Martha Jones historian Martha Jones would call the vanguard generations of black women activists and Polly Murray is kind of setting down that sense of inheritance from those women it addresses something else that you talk about in the book which is the question of chosen families and about how the new science of genetics and DNA which claims a kind of certainty about family connections whereas if in the 19th and the early 20th century the mid 20th century it was genealogical records that created a sense of certainty about descent now it's DNA that offers a kind of veil of certainty around relationships just at the moment where we understand better how just how complex families are how chosen families are whether adoptive families LBGTQ families chosen kin in other words is it and do you think this is asking you outside of the book but do you think there's a moment here where DNA comes along to say this is all certain at the same moment when there's a lot of uncertainty around the fixity of biology and its relationship to families that's a great insight and I wish I made it more explicit in my final chapters I think you're really hitting on a whole array of things that I talk about I think that okay there's a lot to say about how DNA testing that is genealogy focused gets marketed and I think or I know it got marketed successfully especially among people who are sort of taking refuge from how fluid the family seemed to become in the 1990s there's an earlier times too obviously there's a really fraught I would say political set of arguments that truly happens between the political parties and surrounding the religious right are families those families with two heterosexual parents and children or it can a pair of adults that might even be access to each other or not just declare themselves a family so at the point where the family becomes more fluid I think it's expressive of a broader cultural divide if you will and but this turns really complicated when you turn to real people you can people contain many multitudes and you can find the same person living as a member of a found family who is also researching their DNA for some other reason and another thing I want to say about another thing you pointed to and the emergence of the DNA testing clearly and here I'm standing in the shoulder of sociologists and others who have done research I'm about to say there's no doubt that the way DNA test results that are done for genealogy purposes get interpreted currently it reinscribes all these social differences that I spent my book talking about right it reinscribes racial and ethnic differences while if you I don't know if you look even give those basic look to what geneticists are saying and others in the wake of the first genome being fully understood on the other hand the genetic science itself makes nonsense of really of all the ways that humans are distinct from mice let alone all these differences among humans it's sort of an astonishing moment in terms of the persuasion exhibited by marketers and many many ironies here but there's a reason why I have to found families you know the people who the chosen families and that can get interpreted very broadly that's especially noticeable for LGBTQ parents and people who identify as queer gender queer it's a queer practice to go online and like someone I know and adopt someone online to declare yourself a family you know what a moment and how disruptive it is for the old time Victorian family norms that are still cherished by many other people not to mention inscribed into law and still in many parts states all the ways that state constitutions redefine marriage to be between a man and a woman before the Supreme Court decision and my daresay backlash against Obergefell 2015 and look it up I can elaborate more on that I know I opened a can of worms but go ahead well let me ask you to just back up just a minute and let's just talk a little bit about what DNA and what role DNA actually is playing in genealogy let's just back up a little bit to say just to find some of that a little bit so when is it that DNA science actually comes into the mainstream of research and really comes to play a role and what role is it playing in genealogy in genealogical research now that's a great question it's that when we talk about sort of the broader uses of genealogical testing the decade is the 2000s going up to the present the years since 1999 that's when we see really marketed choice genealogists and there are many meanings to talk about for communities of genealogists but the one that I'm especially interested in is that if you're talking if you have ancestors who are hard to document for whatever reason we had a question from someone with adoption for a sort of closed adoption in their family tree for example but you have some situation in your genealogy research where documentation is difficult DNA testing gives can give you another piece of information so it has this particular meaning in Jewish genealogy journals for example where researchers are dealing with this breakage that happened not just with the Holocaust but with all of those programs and things that happened before and all those shifting boundaries in Eastern Europe there's a lot of very active use and discussion in Jewish genealogy communities about uses of DNA obviously African-Americans too and those are the main groups I talk about in the book but it is a really complicated question Karen because there are all these other uses of DNA testing that have an older history like there's a great new book by Naroma Lonich called Paternity an American culture and toward the end she reminds us of all of the cultural importance attached to paternity DNA testing so there's this type of DNA testing that's much older than the stuff that's marketed on mastogeniologists that's done among close family members and that kind of testing also has really active uses and active meanings for modern-day genealogy communities when you read about sort of law enforcement the other year I believe it was the Golden State killer tracked down through specific postings that remote relatives had made on genealogy websites and that kind of DNA testing that happens among close relatives to say that someone has a biological identity or not so that kind of genealogy testing has also carried forward where it's among individuals I wanted to just ask you to talk a little bit about some of the ethics of genealogy online because you alluded to the way that online communities can create open family trees which other people can see and people can make assertions about family connections and there are all kinds of really potent collaborations that take place online that have been on any of the online genealogy lists or as you can see all these incredible research connections that are being made I think that some of those among descendants of enslaved people are particularly significant like the collaborative potential is particularly potent but then there are also these other ethical questions around people volunteering their DNA and family associations becoming known for example to law enforcement and the famous case you raised of the golden state killer being identified because DNA was contributed by one of his second cousins or first cousins I can't remember to one of the commercial sites and actually there are real concerns about privacy issues here with some of this am I right? Absolutely an ancestry itself even in the months, the final few months I was doing copy editing of the manuscript is vastly expanding its I would say attentiveness and policies on privacy and there's a great cultural studies scholar who writes all about ancestry.com and privacy I want to draw everyone's attention to the work of Julia Crete in Canada CREET on this very very matter and of course you and I have to set this on this broader history of privacy relative to social media of all kinds for a long time ancestry which began as a way to enable massive access and one stop shopping if you will for genealogists to access documents of all kinds now it has also tried to enable the kind of communicating and sharing that people don't other kinds of social media and I think this is a really open discussion we're in the middle of this history and it'll be really interesting to see where we are five or ten years in terms of awareness of privacy but in the meantime if you're yourself are concerned about privacy please be aware of what you're posting in terms of genealogy but oh dear I don't want to suppress this tendency I really admire in the history of genealogy and I want to stress is all the sharing that people do to save to prevent duplicating labor but to further along their own research yeah we just got a five minute warning and I believe there's a question in the chat yeah yes I was going to ask I'm going to save one of those for the very very end but I just wanted to ask you if there's anything you can say about what you see is the difference between kind of genealogical research that was happening in the 20th century and genealogical research that's happening now and the way that people are exploring family histories online right okay well the scale has changed the axis has changed you and I and everyone listening to us can do their genealogical research from home or from where we choose but a lot of those broader social developments that I talked about for the 20th century are still there now and I'm a well I kind of end on a down note because I worry with the DNA testing which itself is expressive of the importance that Americans attribute to biological relatedness and blood relationships another iron and we can send the whole promise of the American Revolution right it's this heredity heredity hereditarian thinking being reinscribed when we talk about the non-scientific understanding of DNA and everything everything that knowledge from DNA testing can do to seal relatedness I'm afraid we're looking at DNA is this sort of bodily characteristic and you can get it your DNA interpreted and read in all these ways and we will even reinterpret a DNA test that you've already had in many ways so once I you could say once your DNA is read that itself is a dynamic process however I worry that we're still reinscribing these social differences but a thing that makes me optimistic is all of these non-textual types of research are expanding the genealogical knowledge for groups in society who really fell on the wrong side of all the advantages that would let you get to documentation so documentation itself it's expressive of a set of privileges and I feel like the combination of documents and DNA are moving the fields like African-American genealogy and Jewish genealogy you name it Hispanic genealogy next genealogy all sorts of fields forward that used to be very difficult because of the shortage of documentation so I think I was going to say one of the problems with some of the DNA testing of course is that they're simply reading your individual test against whatever the collection is that they have right so if they only have a collection that is dominated by X or Y then they're going to only understand your test vis-a-vis that X and Y, they're not reading your test against the entire world so that's pretty important to understand why you're talking about this that's proprietary company knowledge just how many people are in sample that your DNA is being compared to and who they are so you're so right DNA evidence has to be used very sparingly with a big grain of salt so one question that came in over the transom is a question about your title and whether your title, a nation of descendants was influenced by John Kennedy's book A Nation of Immigrants he absolutely gave me the idea the title alone I don't claim to engage his thesis otherwise although obviously that roots moment that I talked about is a huge one for communities of recent immigrants and for ideas about ethnic diversity as a positive good in the United States so you could say that I used a nation of descendants and that was my title because I wanted to just start with this very basic characteristic of genealogy in the United States all the ways that it communicates the needs and priorities of descendants and the needs and the priorities of the present day and whatever time period you're doing your genealogy in wonderful well Francesca thank you so much for this wonderful conversation it was really rich and revealing and I'm hoping that lots of people are going to go out and look for the book and again I think we want to thank the National Archives and the archivist for hosting this conversation same here thank you for me and I have all sorts of histories of archives and libraries also in my book so you all are heroes so thanks for me