Feature > by Jane Smith

The Genealogical Bug

Illustration by Thomas McDonough

Where I grew up, in a poor farming community in Missouri, the only people interested in keeping track of pedigrees owned prize-winning polled Herefords. The idea of anybody wanting to trace human pedigrees never occurred to me, not until I overheard my grandmother inform my mother that Aunt Charlotte was a member of the DAR.

My mother explained later that Aunt Charlotte belonged to a special club of women called the Daughters of the American Revolution. Though I imagined a secret sect of elegant women who wore up-dos and owned plastic-covered Louis XV living room furniture like Aunt Charlotte, my mother said they had something else in common: each of them could prove she had a Revolutionary patriot in her family tree. Big deal, I remember thinking, and I didn’t give pedigrees another thought until years later, when I moved to New York City.

Apparently, many people relish the gift of anonymity that New York City bestows equally on all. Some even go so far as to shed old identities and pull on new ones as often as you change underwear. After about a week in Manhattan, I discovered that I was not one of those people. I did not wish to live in a place where nobody knew that I had once been Miss Mark Twain Lake. I didn’t want to invent a new identity—I wanted the old one back.

The only other time I’d felt so bereft was in high school when the new history teacher asked if I belonged to the Smith tribe west of town, folks who hadn’t bathed for generations. After sniffing my armpits, I wondered how in heaven’s name he could have confused me with the stinky Smiths. Everybody in town knew we were the Smiths with the ’68 Chevy rusting in the driveway.

Living in Manhattan offended me even more than the history teacher had. Worse than being mistaken for a stinky Smith was being mistaken for nobody at all, which is how I got mixed up in genealogy.

The day the whole thing started had been ordinary enough. That morning on the No. 6 train, another svelte young thing had speared my toe with her high heel. At the headhunter’s office where I worked, my boss had greeted me with another rude hand gesture. (Whether she hated my guts or wanted to show off her long, immaculately painted fingernails I never knew.) I had proofread the resumes of Wall Street types, inventing excruciating deaths for people who earned six-figure salaries and couldn’t spell.

That night, homesick and feeling sorry for myself, I squeezed into the corner of the kitchen I called an office, flipped open my laptop, and set out to write something deeply meaningful. As usual, I wound up Googling around the World Wide Web until my eyes were heavy with sleep. As a kind of joke, I typed a name—Gideon Higginbotham—into the search field, pressed Return, and yawned.

Now it just so happens that Gideon Higginbotham was one of my great-great-grandfathers, whose name I remembered only because I squealed with delight the first time I heard it. I was five and thought the speaker had said Gideon Higginbottom, which, at the time, was the funniest thing I’d ever heard.

Seconds later, I snapped wide awake. Instead of the nasty message I was expecting, Google gave me a neat list of Web pages on which my ancestor’s preposterous name appeared. Yeah, right, I thought, like this online Gideon Higginbotham could possibly be my Gideon Higginbotham. An old man in the few photographs we have of him, my Gideon Higginbotham was a Baptist farmer with a scraggly beard and a flat, unlovely face who couldn’t possibly be interesting to anybody.
With another click of the mouse, I was staring at the bare facts of a life. Born 1 Jun 1843, Wayne Co., Kentucky. Married second cousin Mary Agnes McKinney 1 Mar 1863. Nine children. Died 20 Dec 1929, Polk Co., Missouri.

This was him all right, my Gideon Higginbotham.

Most nights, the squawking of ambulances sang me to sleep, but that night I sang my own lullaby, chanting “I’ve found my pee-pull!” until I fell unconscious. If Gideon Higginbotham, who’d been dead for 70 years, was important enough to have an Internet identity, maybe his great-great-granddaughter was somebody after all.

At the headhunter’s the next day, I only pretended to be tidying up the resume of William Acton Collingsworth III. In the first burst of energy I’d displayed in ages, I typed the name of every ancestor I could think of into Google’s waiting search field. Before my boss ended this pleasurable activity by hissing “Where’s Collingsworth?” I discovered my new favorite Web sites, FamilySearch.com and Ancestry.com.

Each Web site boasted searchable databases of the dearly departed (“more than 1.5 billion names!”)—and held out so much more. Family Search in particular, a site run by the Mormons, suggested that my as-yet-unknown ancestors were twiddling their thumbs in the spirit world just waiting for me to identify them. Then they and I could form a metaphysical embrace, a charmed circle of family unbroken for eternity. I didn’t mind this idea at all, a fact I kept hidden from my Methodist mother.

Plus, if the couple pictured on the main screen anything to go by, my future kinfolks weren’t too shabby. They stared proudly from my laptop screen, he with handlebar mustache, she in leg-o’-mutton sleeves. An empty search screen hovered discreetly behind them. With a minimum of typing and a lucky mouse-click, I might win this handsome pair of progenitors (or an equivalent). The text accompanying the image was hardly necessary. Did I want to search for my ancestors in the vast record collections of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints? Why, yes, I most certainly did!

In the next few days, I collected three generations of ancestors and neatly penciled their names and vital information onto family pedigree charts downloaded from Ancestry. These were folks I’d heard about all my life—Great-Grandma Lizzie, Harve Milton Holt, Papa Burkhalter—only now they seemed larger, more important. I took to carrying the pedigree charts around in my purse. Now when my boss flipped me the bird, I patted my bag and smirked.

In retrospect, I should have stopped collecting ancestors then and there. I knew Great-Grandma Lizzie had existed—I wound her quilt around my head to muffle the screeching from Second Avenue. But her mother and father were ciphers: I had no quilts, no names, nothing. No self-respecting genealogist would have trusted Family Search and Ancestry to retrieve this generation (and the next and the next) without even the teensiest bit of evidence. But this is just what I did, willfully ignoring the small print warning me of “potential erroneous information from compilers.” My jones for ancestors was something powerful.
I missed work, slept little, and frightened friends and family. Had I seen a Broadway play? they wanted to know. Been to the top of the Empire State Building? “Well, no,” I said impatiently, “but, get this, I’m directly descended from Daniel Boone.” When this news met with silence, I figured ignorance was the problem. “You know, the guy Fess Parker played on TV.”

My addiction led me back through the centuries and up the social ladder. I loved repeating the names of my noble 16th-century ancestors: Cecily Rumilly, Bartholomew de Badlesmere, Euphemia Fitzroger Clavering. When I got to the 12th century and discovered that I was related to Henry II of England, my teeth chattered with happiness. How strange it was—and how apt—that I should be descended from British bluebloods and royalty. This explained everything. No wonder I’d been fascinated with Princess Diana.

There’s something comforting about having an invisible brigade of well-bred ancestors standing behind you, lending support in times of trouble and identity crisis. I discovered that I could endure rush hour on the 6 train with grace and dignity, even when somebody ground her pointy heel into my big toe. “I bet she isn’t related to crowned heads of Europe,” I thought. “Her kind should be dunked in pots of boiling oil.”
By this time, my stack of pedigree charts had outgrown my purse and my backpack. For Christmas, I presented copies to my mother and sister, anticipating their reactions—disbelief, then joy—when they got to the Henry II page. “Well, isn’t this nice,” they said, tearing open their heavy packages. “We can’t wait to look at all your hard work—later, after the holidays.” I beamed with pride. (One of these gifts continues life as a doorstop, while the other has disappeared without a trace.)

At long last, I approached the beginning of recorded history and the end of my family line. My heart raced as I penciled the final names onto a pedigree chart. They were sturdy and Scandinavian: Wulfstan, son of Cyneheard, son of Ohthere, son of Balder, son of Odin. I laid down my pencil and heaved a sigh. My family was complete; I was complete.
Wait a minute—son of Odin? Odin, king of Norse gods, the guy with one eye and ravens perched on his shoulders? Odin the fiction? A nasty little soundtrack in my head started to play Wagner’s Flight of the Valkyries. Inside of a minute, in less time than it takes to describe, I lost my faith in genealogy. One moment I was full of ancestors (and myself), the next moment I was empty—or almost empty, anyway, because I’d picked up a new load of shame. I slunk off to bed and prayed for sleep, but thoughts of those pedigree charts weighed on me until I pulled on slippers and carried the armful down five flights, out of the building, and into the trashcan in the alley. I hope they are now landfill on Staten Island. Sometimes I have nightmares about garbage collectors who point at me and shriek with laughter.

Since the Odin episode, I approach the theory and practice of genealogy with skepticism, though my family thinks I still bear watching. While constructing my family tree, I gathered the most attractive twigs and branches and ignored the broken and blasted limbs. Still, I try not to be too hard on myself: Fledgling genealogists often find the family they want to find, construct the myths they need to shore up the self.

Still, a recent exhibit about eugenics at the International Center of Photography reminded me that delusions of hereditary grandeur can be downright dangerous, especially when combined with a wobbly identity. In the United States in the early 20th century, some educated white folks got frightened that good old American bloodlines were under siege. Industrialization was changing the agrarian economy, promoting the rapid growth of cities, and beckoning immigrants to our shores. Many felt that these newcomers, particularly the ones from southern and eastern Europe, were biologically inferior to America’s original colonists (and Revolutionary patriots) and eugenicists set out to prove that both superior and defective people bred true to type.

I paused for a long time before one framed document on the exhibit wall. It was the pedigree chart of a defective family. Someone had neatly penciled in the names, vital information, and something else—characterizations of each life. One sister was “feeble-minded,” a grandfather was “melancholic”, a mother was “prone to fits.”

Afterward, I started to think about one line of my family that resisted my genealogical craze: my father’s maternal line, whose mental health wasn’t exactly their strong suit. My father heard voices and painted allegorical landscapes. My cousin suffered schizophrenic episodes. All four of my great-aunts had nervous breakdowns, took to bed, and never got out again.

All I had learned was that Great-Grandmother Burkhalter, mother of the recumbent great-aunts, had been adopted. And that her mother was rumored to have lived in Chicago and to have been no better than she should be.

In a photograph of Great-Grandmother Burkhalter, she’s seated with her young husband and two little daughters. By the look of her, the adoptive parents were kind. She holds her head proudly, but there’s something sad about her eyes and she looks not at the photographer but beyond him, as if she sees something her husband and daughters can’t. I wonder about the woman from Chicago.

These days, it’s the gaps and wormholes in the family tree that beguile me, and the look in my great-grandmother’s eyes.