Illustrations by Marc Burckhardt
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The Gene Pull
By Richard Rubin, March & April 2005
The curious joys and odd surprises of tracing your family tree
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I had my first date with genealogy on a warm July afternoon back when I was
still in college. It was not, I must confess, love at first sight.
It was the summer before my senior year, and I had an internship at the
Massachusetts Archives in Boston. After spending several weeks reorganizing
ancient files in the bowels of that facility, I was asked to fill in for a sick
staffer at the information desk. Desperate for human contact (not to mention an
occasional glimpse of daylight), I immediately accepted; a history major, I
delighted in the prospect of helping patrons learn more about John Hancock and
William Lloyd Garrison, the Adamses and the transcendentalists. I straightened
out my Oxford shirt and chinos, checked my posture, put on a
knowledgeable-and-helpful-but-not-intimidating smile, and looked expectantly at
the front door.
It took a while, but eventually someone approached me. He was not at all
what I had expected: a stooped man in his early 60s, scruffy and disheveled, he
looked as if he had spent years living in the subterranean storeroom from which
I had only recently escaped. My smile never wavered; his never managed to
surface at all.
"I want to find my ancestahs," he demanded. "From the
Mayflowah!"
One day I looked up an ancestor—just for fun. That's when the trouble began.
He was not alone: for the rest of that day—and every subsequent day
that I filled in at the information desk—I spent almost all of my time
helping people try to prove that they were descendants of Miles Standish and
his shipmates. They were young and old, educated and not, affluent and
indigent, and every station in between, and every one of them was determined to
find some link between themselves and that old boat. Not just
determined—some of them appeared well on the road to desperate. It was as
if they believed that finding this link would remove some kind of barrier
standing between them and self-realization. I took it as mere vanity and
quickly came to regard them with a mixture of pity and contempt. What kind of
person, I thought, bases his or her sense of self-worth on the date and means
of arrival of their immigrant ancestors?
Of course, this is exactly the kind of question that a 20-year-old who has
only just begun to awaken intellectually, and who thinks he is far more astute
than he actually is, would ask: it appears to carry a certain amount of heft,
to address the frailty of human nature, while in fact it is judgmental and
simplistic. But that's who I was back then; blame it, if you will, on long
hours spent in a concrete bunker under fluorescent lights, alphabetizing the
records of the poor souls who were incarcerated in the Bay State's various
mental institutions between 1886 and 1909. I do.
Whatever the case, the experience instilled in me a great, if also greatly
unjustified, distaste for genealogy. It would take years for me to shed that
distaste entirely and more years to develop into the man I am today, an
enthusiast (to use the polite term) who understands that while genealogy is
indeed sometimes about things like vanity and self-realization, these are not
necessarily bad things. And even if they are, I'm already hooked.
The transformation began, oddly enough, in Memphis in December 1991, when
two unrelated incidents led me to start rethinking my stance on the matter.
I'll get to the first one later; the second occurred at a Christmas party,
where I met a man who shared my last name. In the spirit of the season and
fueled by a good bit of liquid holiday cheer, we marveled at the coincidence
and speculated that we might be related, knowing quite well that, in fact, we
were not: he is black and Baptist with roots in the Deep South; I am white and
Jewish and entirely a product of New York City. He explained he was often taken
for Jewish, at least by those who encountered him only on the telephone, but he
did not, as far as he knew, have even a single Jewish forebear. He did,
however, inform me that in the part of north-central Louisiana where his father
grew up, there were hundreds of people named Rubin, all of whom were black.
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Naturally, this stoked my imagination. How did this happen? It occurred to
me, of course, that if I wanted to solve this mystery, I should just go down to
Louisiana and investigate; but it also occurred to me that this would involve
genealogical research, and that still carried certain negative associations in
my mind. This could be the thin end of the wedge, I thought, a gateway drug to
a full-fledged addiction. Start out on a simple academic quest, end up like
those poor trembling souls at the Massachusetts Archives, ever frantic to find
just one more ancestor. Did I really need this?
Perhaps not, but curiosity has a way of working on me over time, and after
about six years I was able to rationalize that, since I wouldn't actually
be tracing my own family tree, I wouldn't fall into the genealogy trap. I
was wrong, as it happened, but by the time I figured that out it was far too
late.
And here's the strange part: I never was able to solve that mystery, but
I got hooked on genealogy anyway. It started early: the first time I pored over
a Louisiana census roll and spotted the name Rubin in one of the columns, I
experienced the same mixture of astonishment, excitement, and joy that I had as
a child in the 1970s when, canvassing a local park with a metal detector, I dug
up a quarter from 1892. Actually this was even better, because there was no
chance some nosy grownup was going to call my parents and tell them I was
defacing public property.
We were all grownups this time. At the genealogy library in Alexandria,
Louisiana—housed in the town's old Carnegie library
building—there were nothing but adults, along with several thousand
microfilms and reference books. After a few days there I started to recognize a
solid core of regulars, middle-aged men and women who seemed to spend every
long lunch hour at the place, tracking down some great-great-grand-stepsomebody
or other. I introduced myself to them; they, in turn, introduced me to some of
the more byzantine corners of the lifestyle (genealogy, you see, is often too
consuming a passion to be labeled a mere hobby), most of them linked somehow to
the census, the old decennial government ritual that often seems rather dull to
the uninitiated but which is absolutely indispensable to any American
genealogical quest. There is, for starters, the Soundex, an unusual index that
assigns numerical values to combinations of consonants; originally a Works
Progress Administration make-work project, the Soundex has proven invaluable to
legions of researchers by grouping together surnames that sound similar but are
spelled differently—Rubin, Reuben, Ruben, Ruban, Rubinstein, Rabinowitz,
and so on—and thus compensating for variables like the evolution of
names, as well as census takers who sometimes had a casual relationship with
spelling and good penmanship. ("What you have to remember," one
Alexandria regular told me, "is that a lot of times the people providing
the information couldn't read or write at all, and the folks taking it down
weren't much better.") Furthermore, each census has its own quirky
subcategories: the 1880 form, for example, contains a column to indicate
whether or not the person responding to the survey was insane (a check mark in
that column always makes reading the rest of the survey a more intriguing
venture), while the 1930 census indicates whether or not the household in
question contained a radio set. And then there is the great tragedy of the 1890
census, which burned in a fire in the basement of the Commerce Building in
Washington, D.C., where it was being stored. If you want to make a genealogist
sigh ruefully, just say "1890." You might even want to have a
handkerchief handy.
Each find helped teach me that I am who I am because they were who they were.
Most significant, I learned that the peculiar feeling I experienced upon
spotting a familiar name in the rolls was not unique. It was, however, quite
addictive. Moreover, it seemed to intensify with every new
discovery—especially once I made the transition to tracing my own
ancestors.
It was only natural, I suppose. After all, I had done all this legwork,
acquired all these new research skills; it was becoming increasingly difficult
to justify not applying them to my own family tree. One day, while I had the
1900 census handy, I thought I'd try—just for fun, naturally—to
see if I could find anyone in there from whom I was actually descended. And
that's when the trouble really began.
If you're going to be serious about the pursuit, at some point
you're probably going to feel obligated to visit the mecca of genealogy:
the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' Family History Library in
Salt Lake City. The place looms so large in the imaginations of genealogists
that I was surprised to find, when I finally got there myself, that it
wasn't some sort of tall, gleaming castle but rather a plain concrete box.
No one seems to mind, though; on the days I went, deep into a frigid winter,
dozens of people queued up to get in when the doors opened at 8 a.m. In the
warmer months, I'm told, the line stretches for blocks.
It is, at first glance, no more impressive on the inside. Aside from the
panoramic painting hanging behind the reception desk that depicts the
intersection of religion and genealogy—and a large mural that illustrates
how Stephen Douglas, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
George W. Bush, and Mitt Romney are all descended from colonist Anne Hutchinson
(a chart that doubtless inspires many a tired tree-tracer to plug on)—it
looks very much like a typical research library, albeit a very large one. There
are scores of computer terminals and hundreds of microfilm viewers and
vertiginously long rows of file cabinets containing more than 2.5 million rolls
of microfilm, and, on any given day, around 2,000 people using them; 850,000
visitors passed through the place at some point last year. Many of them arrive
for the first time with a misconception of what the library is. "I
can't tell you how often we'll get people in here who are on a layover
for a few hours at the airport and just drop by to pick up a copy of their
family tree," Tim Bingaman, a research specialist at the library, told me.
"And I have to explain that we don't just have them on file."
Contrary to popular belief, the Mormons aren't really in that business
(although many of their library's regulars—professional
researchers—are), and what's more, almost all of the records you can
find in that facility can also be found throughout the rest of the country and
the world in local libraries and courthouses and archives. What makes the CLDS
Family History Library so special is that it has them all in one
place—and that, by and large, everyone who comes to visit the library has
the same objective in mind. There is a certain camaraderie in the tree-tracing
trenches, since genealogy is hardly a zero-sum game and everyone has a pretty
good sense of what that guy in the next carrel, who just spent four hours
poring over ship manifests and came away with nothing, is going through. But
they are also unfailingly determined, and most of the time the place resembles
nothing so much as a casino, rows upon rows upon rows of microfilm viewers
lined up like slot machines, the people sitting at them rhythmically tugging
the cranks, their faces slack as they watch page after page of film spin past,
yet ever ready to spring back into joyous focus if and when they hit the
jackpot and a familiar name pops up.
And even though the library has clocks and windows all over the place, a
great many visitors pass six or eight or even 10 hours without noticing and
scarcely without budging, because they know what I learned that afternoon in
Alexandria, Louisiana, when I thought I'd take a break from tracing someone
else's family tree and see if I could actually find anyone from my own. I
did, of course, without too much effort; and then I found another, and another,
names on a paper—not even a paper, really, just a photograph of
one—that I'd heard before: a grandfather's uncle who was a
pioneer in the movie business; a great-grandfather who owned a grocery store in
Connecticut; another great-grandfather who made his living airbrushing
photographs and who died of emphysema contracted from the chemicals he used in
his work; a great-great-grandfather who emigrated from Russia in 1887 and died
just eight years later, in his early 50s, of peritonitis. And with each
successive discovery, that metal-detector-unearthing-a-quarter-from-1892
sensation increased exponentially, because each discovery matched a name to a
story or a story to a name, and each connected me more securely to an
ever-expanding network that linked me to a history, to my history, and helped
me understand that I am who I am because they were who they were. Yes, on some
level people get into genealogy because they want to learn more about
themselves; but on another, deeper level they do it for the same reason that
people do almost everything that's not directly related to putting food on
the table or perpetuating the species: because they want to feel that they are
a part of something much bigger than just themselves.
Now, perhaps that's no more noble a rationale than vanity or
self-realization; perhaps it's not even all that different. But it's
also about as purely human a motivation as there is, and many a noble thing has
been done with that as an impetus. And genealogists, in the bargain, get to
join two new and ever-burgeoning communities: the community of their ancestors
and the community they find online, in courthouses, and at libraries. And
that's a lot more than many people will ever have.
As for practical advice: the most persistent bit I've heard floating
about holds that the best place to start scaling your family tree is the branch
closest to the ground—that is, you. What bits and pieces of the picture
do you already have in your possession, perhaps without even realizing it? What
stories and anecdotes and legends did your parents and aunts and uncles and
grandparents share with you in your youth? You'd be surprised at how many
of them contain at least a particle of truth.
As an example, I offer my own father, who would often, when I was growing
up, tell me with pride about this ancestor or that: scholars, rabbis,
philosophers, inventors, that great-grand-uncle who was writing and directing
motion pictures a decade before the advent of talkies. But my father's
favorite claim was that a first cousin of his mother's—a vaudevillian
named Lou Handman—had written one of Elvis Presley's biggest
hits.
Now, even as a child, this statement seemed preposterous to me. For one
thing, I knew Lou Handman was several years older than my grandmother, which
would have made him older than 60 when Elvis first started recording; for
another, even someone as musically inexperienced as I was knew that Elvis
didn't do vaudeville material. I shared these insights with my father, who
stood by his story. The more he stood by it the harder I strove to dismantle
it, generating a cycle not conducive to domestic tranquility. Eventually, I
just dropped the matter and forgot about it.
Which brings me to the other thing that happened to me in Memphis in
December 1991, a week or two before that Christmas party I mentioned earlier. I
went to a flea market and came away with a box of about a hundred 78-rpm
records, for which I paid a total of $6. I had been collecting 78s for some
time, mostly to have something to play on a Victrola I owned. They were
cheapest if bought in bulk, so that's what I did, taking them home, sorting
through them, and giving my castoffs to friends or radio stations. I could tell
by the label what year a record was cut, and I kept only those made before
1925, unless it was by a well-known artist or had something else of interest to
recommend it. If it was a close call, I might even listen to it before
rendering a judgment.
On the day in question, I was breezing through the box when I came across a
disk on the Columbia label from 1927; the artists were listed as Oscar Grogan
and The Columbians. I was about to toss it in the discard pile when I decided,
for some reason, to give it a spin first. I cranked up the Victrola, set the
needle down, and immediately went back to sorting, barely listening. But a
minute later, I stopped short: I knew this song. I leapt up, ran over to the
phonograph, yanked up the tone arm, pulled the record off the platter, and
studied its label:
"Are You Lonesome To-Night?" Words and Music by Roy Turk
and Lou Handman
I never figured out how to tell my father that he was right after all. Until
now.
New Yorker Richard Rubin, the author of
Confederacy of Silence (Atria, 2003), is at work on a book about World
War I.
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