The Invisible History of the Human Race

Why does the world hate genealogists? Or, to rephrase, why are the masses of people around the world who are engaged in questions about their family's past often dismissed by those who aren't? When I started writing The Invisible History of the Human Race, a book about what gets passed down, I met many people who were deeply engaged in the very popular hobby, but there was a lot of negativity as well. DISMISSING GENEALOGY "Oh, it's a real American thing," one person observed. Others said it wasn't "real history." Critics with more existential concerns argued that even if you had access to this or that document from someone's past, you could never determine from it what he or she was truly like. The Guardian columnist Zoe Williams wrote that genealogy "conveys a silent prejudice that never has the guts to announce itself. Ferreting about for antecedents in parish records says, effectively: 'I attach a certain value to having always come from Suffolk or wherever. Oh, no, no, no, I don't mean being foreign is bad; I just mean it's so much nicer not to be.'" Another journalist wrote about explaining to his teen daughter, a genealogy buff, that "nothing in her genealogy defines her." Really? If a person's genealogy is the series of individuals whose coupling eventually produced that person, then it's hard to see how this is plausible. Surely some part of our identity has come down to us through our parents from our grandparents and from their parents. What we inherited needn'...
Source: Science - The Huffington Post - Category: Science Source Type: news