Pondering the Task of Pondering Your Origins

Colorado State University Libraries. Public domain image via Wikimedia Commons. I’ve written before about what I’ll call my ambivalence about genealogical research—or rather, how it often gets presented in the US American context, as a tool of instant and heartening connection to a past and its actors, of self-revelation, of good feeling all around. Ancestry.com commercials are necessarily more sanguine and thin on context than Finding Your Roots (which I admit I often binge). For the most part, though, genealogy in a diverse and polarized country that’s long touted itself as being free from the shackles of the past, free to move fast and break things, can’t but boil down to a sentimental exercise. Unless you’re Ben Affleck, the sense is that you can’t be blamed for where you came from; no guilt attaches to you via your lineage, because the individual is all, and you didn’t make the decisions for or have any influence over long-dead individuals.1 The topic’s come up again thanks to…