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"The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission," a seminar of CLAL’s Jewish Public Forum held March 18-19, 2002 in New York City, brought together leading thinkers on education, culture, Judaic studies, and online learning. eCLAL is publishing a series of articles based on participants’ contributions to the seminar. This seminar was part of Exploring the Jewish Futures: A Multidimensional Project On the Future of Religion,Ethnicity and Civic Engagement. For more information about the project, click here.
Libby Garland, a senior fellow at CLAL and a doctoral candidate at the University of Michigan -- where she is completing a dissertation about Jewish illegal immigration to the U.S. during the 1920s -- participated in "The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission" seminar. Her contribution follows below.
The Genealogy of Genealogy: Present, Past and Future
By Libby Garland
As an historian, I
think a lot about the role of history in both education and cultural transmission. How do
we see the past shaping us, and what do we want to pass on about the past to future
generations? But instead of talking about the
kind of history I do, I want to consider a kind of history other people do.
A few years ago, I
was at my parents’ home and they were going through the mail. In with the bills was a special offer for a
personalized reference book. The
mass-produced cover letter asked, “Curious about Garland family history?” Well, it went on, the first Garland to come to
this country was Walter Garland, who arrived in Virginia in 17 something. For a low, low price, a book about all of
Walter’s American Garland descendants could be ours.
Now, my parents’ parents and grandparents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern
Europe. So the idea of 18th
century Virginia Walter Garland made my parents laugh.
Oy, said my mom, do they have the wrong Garlands.
Well, the marketing
ploy got something wrong. But it also got
something right – namely, that there is a huge market out there for information about
family history. Genealogy—the search for
and study of family lineage—is, I would argue, one of the most important ways
Americans today imagine what they have inherited from the past and construct the history
they want to preserve for the future.
Genealogy comes close to being a
national obsession these days. According to Rachel Fisher, director of the Genealogy Institute of the Center for Jewish History,
its popularity as a hobby is surpassed only by gardening.
This enthusiasm for
genealogy is something any historian who goes to archives encounters. When I go to the National Archives or the Center
for Jewish History or the New York Public Library, many of my fellow researchers are
looking for documents that mention their relatives. I
vie with genealogists for microfilm readers and photocopiers.
Yet, many
institutions concerned with cultural transmission and the relevance of the past don’t
pay much attention to genealogy. Academic
historians tend to look down on it. Genealogy, many of us might say, is okay, but not
really very historical. We see history and culture changing in
macro-structural terms. We attend to large
waves of migration or the introduction of television or the rise and fall of political
regimes, whereas genealogists are more interested in who begat or married whom than in
such large-scale shifts. Like the academy,
many religious and ethnic institutions are uninterested in genealogy. Rachel Fisher observed that Jewish institutions
focus on fostering Jewish identity through participation in religious ritual and making
historical connections to Israel and the Holocaust, but remain virtually unaware of
genealogists’ experiences of forging Jewish identities through researching family
history.
Genealogy is, in
fact, interesting in part because it is such a thoroughly grassroots phenomenon. There is an entire subculture of genealogical
societies, conferences, and Internet chats, both ethnically based and broader, all largely
unconnected to mainstream educational or ethnic institutions.
This is not to say
that no one has noticed. Research
institutions often have staff dedicated to genealogy; sometimes, their very systems of
cataloging and storage are tailored to genealogists’ needs. And, as my Walter Garland story suggests, the
marketplace knows about genealogists. You can buy elaborate family tree software programs
or pay for access to a genealogy Web site’s particular set of data. This month, by the way, is Jewish
Genealogy Month—you can buy the poster to prove it.
A historian might
point out that the genealogy craze is itself “rooted” in a larger historical
context. In the late nineteenth century,
researching ancestry was mostly done to prove an elite pedigree in order, say, to gain
membership in the Daughters of the American Revolution.
The current boom is different, largely the product of the 1960s and
‘70s upsurge in popular interest in ethnic roots.
In his book Mystic Chords of Memory, cultural
historian Michael Kammen argues that the new passion for genealogy reflects a wider
American nostalgia for the past; in this age of emphasis on newness and fast-paced change,
he suggests, people crave history. Genealogists,
like those who flock to historical museums or battle reenactments, are expressing a modern
longing for connection with the past.
Genealogists
themselves give a number of reasons for their involvement in family history. Some say it makes history personal instead of
abstract and dull. Some say genealogy is a
fun puzzle; many describe it as addictive. Some
do it for spiritual reasons–the Mormons, for instance, constitute a notable exception
to religious institutions’ disregard for genealogy;
in fact, they maintain the world’s most impressive genealogical records
for religious reasons. Some genealogists say
their work gives them something to pass on to their children. Most see their family history as their own history; family history is the thing from
the past that explains and creates identity. That
is, genealogists say they are learning who they are by learning “where they come
from,” whether they are adoptees researching their biological families, or Jewish
Americans researching nineteenth century shtetl
forebears.
All this might seem
straightforward. But I want to suggest that
genealogy is a practice riddled with contradictions about how we imagine and engage in
cultural transmission. It insists on the
primary role family history plays in passing on cultural identity, even as it acknowledges
that often we know about such history only if we do intensive labor to trace it—a
more obvious measure of distance from the past than of connection to it. I would suggest that the practice also
encapsulates both radical and conservative notions about how cultural transmission works,
and that it is both deeply mainstream and deeply countercultural.
On the one hand, for instance,
genealogists learn that family histories are seldom tidy, that they often reveal a good
deal of ethnic and racial mixing, that “tradition” and culture are fluid
(Hasidic parents may beget Socialist children, for instance), that irregular and
illegitimate relationships have always abounded. On
the other hand, as historian Karen Miller points out in an insightful essay, charts and
diagrams genealogists use generally represent “family” in terms of biological
descent and the legal institution of marriage; other sorts of relationships remain outside
the historical frame of “where I come from.”
Miller also notes that genealogists’ visions of their ancestors’
lives often reflect a deeply privatized view of history as well, even as researchers rely
on large-scale public institutions—government archives, social security records,
telephone directories—to tell them of their relatives’ lives.
A few thoughts
about the future: Genealogy may affect and be affected by many societal shifts, including
changing ideas about race, ethnicity, tradition, and biology. Let me focus on two issues: information technology
and the rise of genetic science. The spread
of the Internet and digitization will spur, I think, another boomlet in the genealogy
world—it is already doing so. While this will certainly make for even more
high-tech gadgets to peddle, it is noteworthy that, despite the brisk commerce in
genealogy products, genealogy is also a pursuit that privileges non-market relationships. This is true both because genealogy insists on the
historical importance of family, and also
because genealogists volunteer an enormous amount of time to communal projects that extend
far beyond their own families—for instance, to creating the vast, free databases of
historical information accessible via the Internet. Might
this be an interesting model for future grassroots data-sharing, up there with Linux and
Napster?
As for genetics,
it’s interesting to ask whether genealogy will fit well with our new genetic
determinism, or challenge it. On one level,
it would seem a perfect fit—two modes of thinking that emphasize lines of biological
descent in explaining “who I am”; you can already buy a service that lets you
combine cheek cell DNA data with surname-based records in your genealogical research. On the other hand, I like to think that perhaps
genealogy, for all its culturally conservative implications, might continue to provide a
vision of family and history that insists more on the centrality of personal
stories—the when, where, how and with whom of people’s lives—than on chains
of nucleic acid in creating identities.
To read additional articles by Libby Garland, click here.
To view other essays from "The Future of Education and Cultural Transmission" seminar, click here.
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