Family Trees

François Weil

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780674076372
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The quest for roots has been an enduring American preoccupation. Over the centuries, generations have sketched coats of arms, embroidered family trees, established local genealogical societies, and carefully filled in the blanks in their bibles, all in pursuit of self-knowledge and status through kinship ties. This long and varied history of Americans' search for identity illuminates the story of America itself, according to François Weil, as fixations with social standing, racial purity, and national belonging gave way in the twentieth century to an embrace of diverse ethnicity and heritage.Seeking out one's ancestors was a genteel pursuit in the colonial era, when an aristocratic pedigree secured a place in the British Atlantic empire. Genealogy developed into a middle-class diversion in the young republic. But over the next century, knowledge of one's family background came to represent a quasi-scientific defense of elite "Anglo-Saxons" in a nation transformed by immigration and the emancipation of slaves. By the mid-twentieth century, when a new enthusiasm for cultural diversity took hold, the practice of tracing one's family tree had become thoroughly democratized and commercialized.Today, Ancestry.com attracts over two million members with census records and ship manifests, while popular television shows depict celebrities exploring archives and submitting to DNA testing to learn the stories of their forebears. Further advances in genetics promise new insights as Americans continue their restless pursuit of past and place in an ever-changing world.

1

LINEAGE AND FAMILY IN COLONIAL AMERICA

The letter that arrived in England from Massachusetts in 1725 was unexpected. It bore the signature of the minister of Boston’s New Brick Church, William Waldron, a third-generation colonist whose genealogical curiosity had led him to seek help and information. Both Waldron’s grandfather, a participant in the great migration of the 1630s, and his father had been respected political and military figures in New England. His older brother Richard followed in their steps, became a judge, and later held the coveted office of secretary of the province. As a second son, William Waldron predictably chose the pulpit. Born in 1697, he graduated from Harvard College in 1717 and was ordained pastor of the New Brick Church in 1722. In 1725 he sent a letter to England.¹

“It was a very pleasant surprise to me to receive a Letter from you, who no doubt are of the same Name and Family with myself, tho’ a letter in it be transposed,” Waldron’s correspondent John Walrond, a minister in Ottery St. Mary in Devon, England, acknowledged. “You and I are of one Family, Faith, and Profession.” He might have added that they were both interested in genealogy.

To answer his New England kinsman’s questions, the English minister made inquiries in neighboring Somerset, where Waldron’s ancestors originated. He also offered genealogical details about his own branch of the family. The family seat, he explained, had been located in Devon for about 600 years, and most Walronds had remained in the region: “I never could find any of our Name, in all England, but in the Western Countries.” Two branches, however, had left England: one “went, as Merchants to Barbadoes, grew rich, and was in the Government there”; the other one was the New England Waldrons.

John Walrond assured his Boston correspondent that he would keep looking into their genealogy and serve as his de facto genealogical agent in England: “I wish you had let me know into what Family your Grandfather married, for that might perhaps have given Light into the Enquiry; however I will examine farther, and take the first opportunity to inform you, as I can get Intelligence.” He also provided him with information about the family’s social status and volunteered an etymology for their family name, as well as a description of their coat of arms: it was “three Bulls Heads, as you’l see by my seal on this Letter.”²

William Waldron and John Walrond’s epistolary exchange affords a glimpse into the genealogical consciousness that existed in the Atlantic world during the colonial period. The two men lived in societies where genealogical preoccupations, inquiries, and reasoning were common. As Walrond’s letter suggests, two meanings of genealogy coexisted at the time: the dominant one was related to social status, claimed or actual, while the other was a form of kin bonding. Walrond’s emphasis on his family estate, coat of arms, and antiquity of name disclosed his proclamation of gentility. He assumed with good reason that William Waldron shared his interests and aspirations in Boston. For both men, a family tree suggested anteriority, lineage, and distinction. It served as a social marker in a world organized around notions of deference and difference.

At the same time, John Walrond expressed a revealing sense of kinship with his correspondent. He felt close to his newfound New England distant relative and made sure to sign his letter “Your affect[ionate] Kinsman and Serv[ant].” For him, as for many American colonists, some of humble extraction and modest social aspiration, genealogy suggested a psychological, intellectual, and affective relation to time, ancestors, and family. Although they were less visible than the dominant, status-related search for pedigree, widespread kin-related genealogical practices developed during the eighteenth century in the British Atlantic world and contributed to the progressive elaboration of a distinctive American mode of thinking about and practicing genealogy.

American colonists participated in a vigorous Euro-Atlantic genealogical culture and consciousness, connected to a conception of individuals situated in Christian time. The Bible’s emphasis on genealogy had long stimulated Europeans to think of their ancestors and kinsmen in genealogical terms. By the time of John Walrond’s answer to William Waldron, genealogy had experienced a succession of remarkable developments during the Middle Ages and the early modern period.

Genealogy was originally the prerogative of kings and princes. The oldest surviving royal genealogies in Europe go back to the sixth century A.D. for Gothic sovereigns, to the seventh century for their Irish, Lombardic, Visigothic, and Frankish counterparts, and to the eighth and ninth centuries for Anglo-Saxon and Carolingian kings. Not until the mid-eleventh century did the practice of genealogy affect princely courts. By the twelfth century the growth of an ideology of lineage induced lesser nobles to set down their pedigrees in order to lay claim to land and establish political authority. At first, medieval genealogists were monks working in monasteries to compose the charters that established their aristocratic benefactors’ rights to land; later the high nobility used the services of secular clergy to produce the pedigrees they needed.³

Whether authentic or fictional, origins mattered. Time and antiquity strengthened contemporary pretensions and ambitions. Thus many royal and princely courts throughout Europe claimed Trojan origins. In eleventh-century Normandy genealogists imagined a Trojan lineage for William the Conqueror’s ancestor, the Viking chief Rollo. A century later in England, Geoffrey of Monmouth’s Historia Regum Britanniae adopted and reinforced a Trojan account of British origins already presented three centuries earlier in the Historia Brittonum. Genealogy provided legitimacy to kings and princes, higher and lesser nobles. The recording of a pedigree was a political act and a testimony to the genealogist’s obedient creativity. France’s Capetian kings and the Wittelsbach dukes of Bavaria manipulated the catalog of earlier dynasties into their own genealogy to root their legitimacy in a much deeper history than their own lineage could provide.⁴

By the fourteenth century the upwardly mobile commercial bourgeoisie of medieval cities imitated the nobility and proudly displayed their ancestral lineage. Many Florentine bourgeois composed personal record books after 1350 to keep track of their investments and their lineage. At a time when life was extremely fragile, these narratives constructed a family identity, reinforced a lineage’s political and patrimonial claims, and helped family members define their situation vis-à-vis the marital requirements of canon law (who was a cousin and who was not, whom one could marry and whom one could not).⁵

Late fifteenth- and early sixteenth-century Europe saw a remarkable growth of genealogy that lasted for over two centuries. Members of the nobility needed pedigrees in order to defend their status and privileges against bourgeois upstarts and in response to official investigations of nobility. Spanish inquiries to establish membership in the gentry, French efforts to probe nobility, and the visitations of England, which members of the College of Arms undertook between the mid-sixteenth century and the late seventeenth century, all stimulated genealogical interest and productions within aristocratic and gentry families.⁶

At the same time, successful merchants and other members of urban bourgeoisies launched genealogical pursuits in order to conform in their own specific ways to the dominant aristocratic model. Building on medieval traditions, sixteenth-century bourgeois turned account books and books of hours into family records where they consigned household data, memorialized family events, and inscribed pedigrees. In some remarkable instances they composed illuminated genealogical books and chronicles. All these private records associated genealogical consciousness and celebration of social aspirations, ancient roots, and power.⁷

The extension of status-related genealogical pursuits beyond the nobility—a major legacy of the Middle Ages and the early modern period—raised difficult issues of control and authenticity. In German or Italian cities political fragmentation prevented any effort to regulate genealogical claims and pursuits. The context was different in centralized or centralizing monarchies like England, France, or Spain, where access to nobility was an important source of income. To oversee the process, new genealogical bureaucracies developed in England, France, and Spain by the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, raising the stakes of the genealogical enterprise but also contributing to the vogue of genealogy.⁸

Pedigrees became state matters at a moment when the nature and meaning of genealogical truth changed. Genealogies that had formerly been considered true were suddenly unbelievable. Even as older ways to produce traditional pedigrees survived, science challenged tradition and became a dominant mode in genealogy by the late seventeenth century. The new, critical genealogy was the product of its time. Instead of finding a lineage’s original and fantastic ancestor, it was now more important to discover the depth of one’s nobility and prove it. This required erudition rather than imagination, science rather than tradition.⁹

European states encouraged these developments, especially among their new genealogical bureaucrats. Demands for critical evidence and authority could be heard in France—where the offices of royal genealogist and judge of arms were created in 1595 and 1615—and in England, where the nature of the College of Arms, formally chartered under Richard III in 1484, changed significantly over the sixteenth century. Until then the heralds acted as masters of ceremonies at tournaments and served as messengers and diplomats. Now this traditional diplomatic role gave way to genealogy and heraldry. The new genealogists were often interested in history and antiquarianism. French genealogists like André Duchesne were historians of royal and aristocratic families. In England, members of the College of Arms knew how to search the Tower Record Office and look for evidence in medieval charters. The publication of William Lambarde’s Perambulation of Kent in 1576 and the creation of the Society of Antiquarians in 1586 symbolized the new interest in local history, antiquarianism, and genealogy.¹⁰

During the first half of the seventeenth century, the combination of antiquarianism, the visitations the heralds were instructed to conduct on a regular basis to certify or disprove the pedigree rolls of the gentry, and the need to establish land titles sparked a remarkable proliferation of gentleman genealogists and antiquaries in England. The gentry needed pedigrees to confirm their claim, and the visiting heralds empowered local deputies to paint arms, thus helping spread heraldry and genealogy outside the College of Arms into English culture, from Ben Johnson and William Shakespeare to Andrew Marvell.¹¹

Particularly significant was the publication of heraldic and genealogical tools that would serve English genealogists and their colonial counterparts for over two centuries. Heraldry books like Gerard Legh’s Accedence of Armory and John Guillim’s authoritative Display of Heraldrie (six editions between 1611 and 1724) could be found in many private libraries. William Dugdale’s Baronage of England found worthy successors in Arthur Collins’s Peerage of England (1707), Thomas Wolton’s Baronetage (1727 and 1741), and Joseph Edmondson’s 1764 Baronagium genealogicum.¹²

The rise of critical genealogy was no guarantee of authenticity. The late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are famous for the fabrications produced by officers of arms and genealogists throughout Europe. In 1930 the acid-tongued British genealogist J. Horace Round divided the pedigrees of that period into “those that rested on garbled versions of perfectly genuine documents,… those which rested on alleged transcripts of wholly imaginary documents, those which rested on actual forgeries expressly concocted for the purpose, and lastly those which rested on nothing but sheer fantastic fiction.” Undoubtedly all could be found—for a price—in England and elsewhere in Europe. In particular, many beneficiaries of the profitable royal trade in, and subsequent inflation of, honors that developed in late Tudor and Stuart England needed a pedigree to give legitimacy to their newly bought dignity, especially after the creation of the rank of baronet in 1611.¹³

To a certain extent, the American colonies inherited these European traditions and this practice of genealogy, but their colonial situation added one important nuance. Genealogical expertise remained largely lodged in metropolitan centers like London and Madrid. There were no pedigree experts, antiquarians, or institutions empowered to validate heraldic or genealogical claims in the Spanish and British colonies in the Americas. Genealogical claims were easier to make in the colonies, but the intervention of the imperial metropolis was required to validate these claims. In this, as in other matters, Euro-American colonists lived on the periphery of empire.

Not until the eighteenth century did status-related genealogical inquiries by Euro-American colonists reveal the growth of a genealogical consciousness in the form of pedigree or family trees. William Waldron’s letter to his kinsman John Walrond in 1725 signaled such an interest, as did similar letters sent twenty years later to England by William Browne of Salem, Massachusetts, and Thomas Lee of Stratford, then president of the Council of the Colony of Virginia. Browne made inquiries about his British relatives during the 1740s and 1750s because he was making out “the Pedigree” and had “a regard for the several branches” of his family. Lee was interested in the ancestry of his grandfather, Richard Lee, who had arrived in Virginia in 1640 and apparently had believed that he was descended from the ancient Lee family of Coton Hall in Shropshire. John Gibbon, who paid a visit to Richard Lee in 1659–1661 and later became an officer of the College of Arms in London, noted that the Virginia Lees used the Coton Lees’ coat of arms. Third-generation Thomas Lee did so, but he felt the need to learn more about his family’s lineage, wrote to Lancelot Lee of Coton about it in the mid-1740s, and received a detailed answer about common ancestors.¹⁴

Until the 1670s status-related genealogical consciousness usually took the form of heraldic devices bearing a family’s coat of arms (seals, gravestones) and of inscriptions on tombs. Armorial wax seals were by far the most common heraldic object in sevent...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Prologue
• 1. Lineage and Family in Colonial America
• 2. The Rise of American Genealogy
• 3. Antebellum Blood and Vanity
• 4. “Upon the Love of Country and Pride of Race”
• 5. Pedigrees and the Market
• 6. Everybody’s Search for Roots
• Abbreviations
• Notes
• Acknowledgments
• Index