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"Around 1600, a shipwrecked English sailor named Andrew Battell fell into the hands of an African people known as the Jaga. Pushed out of their own central African homeland, the Jaga had been fighting their way southwards for decades, and had militarized their culture beyond even Spartan levels. Infants born in the army camps were killed at birth, Battell reported, lest they should slow their progress; the Jaga maintained their numbers by adopting the older children of conquered tribes. Out of several thousands warriors, only about a dozen older men were of the original Jaga stock. When an Italian traveller met them 80 years later, the Jaga lived in a permanent city. They no longer had any genetic link to the men who began the march, but culturally they remained the Jaga, proud of their "ancestors" and faithful to their now ancient military law: all children born in their city were still subject to infanticide, so warriors’ wives took care to give birth outside its walls.
The Jaga are a salutary (if extreme) reminder, according to Queen’s University historian Donald Akenson, of a truth that genealogists ignore at their peril—genealogy is a social, not biological, construct. Tracing lineage is a universal cultural imperative, Akenson notes in his marvellous book Some Family: The Mormons and How Humanity Keeps Track of Itself (McGill-Queen’s UP), our prime means of keeping our sense of collective self from dissolving into "swirl and flux." It tells us who is entitled to what in a material sense and who may marry whom; equally important is the social cohesion conveyed by a shared history that shades, in traditional societies, into a common origin myth. Just don’t confuse the storyline with literal truth.
Akenson aims his warning squarely at the Church of Latter Day Saints’ vast genealogical project—and those who utilize it to research their family lines. He means it kindly, for Akenson is an unabashed admirer of the Mormons’ "immodest, hubristic, monumental and heroic" undertaking. Since 1894, the LDS has been gathering the information required to create a single human family tree, one that will include each of the 102 to 106 billion of us that demographers estimate to have ever lived, and it has done so in the generous spirit of retro-baptizing everyone and thus seeing the entire species into heaven. (This despite the fact Mormon hell is remarkably mild, at least compared to the damnation envisaged by the more fire-and-brimstone faiths, and barely inhabited at all—in an interview Akenson says the only occupant he is sure of is Judas Iscariot and "maybe Hitler.")
The Saints’ Family History Library now contains two billion names, collected from old Bibles, census documents, and every other demographic source it could tap. The Mormons have poured resources into their goal, introducing five generations of new computer systems between 1969 and 1991. Once they find—as Akenson is sure they will—efficient ways of mining the genealogical riches of Asia, there’s every reason to expect the Saints will collect as many as five billion names of real people. That’s an astonishing statistic, well worth emphasizing: the Mormons are set to identify five per cent of all the individual humans who have ever existed.
This is the approximate point at which Akenson thinks the Mormons will hit the wall of forgetfulness, made up of cultures (and social classes) in which names were never written down and are forever lost. But it’s the problems inherent in the current two billion names that most intrigue the historian. Human interbreeding, not just third cousins but much, much closer than we care to contemplate (and in most cultures, record), is rampant in all our ancestry. Without it, an individual living now would have required, 2,000 years ago, separate ancestors to the number of 6 followed by 23 zeroes. Estimated world population in the time of Christ: 300 million.
Then there are the genealogies uncritically absorbed from various ancestor-fixated cultures. They tend to stretch back to mythic eras. Akenson checked his own Swedish ancestry and found he was related to "Odin and other folk who came from Asgaard." At least great-great- etc. grandfather Thor sticks outs like a red flag; the far more widespread instances of false paternity lie hidden.
Medical research indicates that between five and 10 per cent of children are not the biological offspring of the men commonly called their fathers. (It is, indeed, a wise child who knows his own father.) Matrilineal reckoning is more certain, but given the one-in-10 childbirth mortality rates in pre-modern societies, "mother" in old records at times means the woman who raised the child. But most genealogies, certainly those in the Western tradition, are patrilineal—consider the long line of "begats" in the Old Testament (the Mormons certainly do). Any male lineage of that length, says the genetic evidence, is almost certainly broken somewhere along the line.
So is the Family History Library useless? Not at all, according to Akenson. Identity is social too—we are who our cultures say we are. If you want to know where great-grandpa (whether he was so genetically or not) came from, the Mormons have provided an unparalleled resource, one that reinforces a lesson humans often forget: we’re all family."
– Brian Bethune
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