McGill-Queen's University Press Blog

I dream of genealogy

Gary Wills, a man who has written an unseemly number of books and whose thoughts regularly grace the pages of The New York Review of Books, has a beef with intellectuals: They don't understand how important religion is to the average American. This is clearly an important point for Mr. Wills, for it is almost impossible to pick up one of his (many) books without being told that intellectuals are so many ostriches, hiding their heads in the sand lest they be confronted with the bugbear that is religiosity.

This is true - up to a point. Most intellectuals do have a quarrel with religion as it is understood and practised south of the border, so much so that they apt to dismiss it out of hand. But there is the occasional exception, the intellectual who understands American religiosity all too well: The late William McLoughlin, Nathan O. Hatch and Columbia's Herbert Balmer come first to mind.

To that list we can now add our own Donald Harman Akenson, a professor at Queen's University and the author of several critically acclaimed books: An Irish History of Civilization, Saint Saul: A Skeleton Key to the Historical Jesus, Surpassing Wonder: The Invention of the Bible and the Talmuds, and more.

Some Family takes Akenson in yet another direction: into the esoterica of the Mormons' beliefs and their particular fondness for genealogy. Neither is particularly obvious to the outsider, and that Akenson is able to tell the story so well and so effortlessly suggests that he is a scholar of unusual gifts.

Akenson is at his most nimble in explaining the many ways in which the Mormons have improved on the Bible. This is not a small point: Biblical inerrancy is an article of faith among conservative evangelicals, and once you accept this, you realize that Mitt Romney doesn't have a chance in hell of making it through the Republican primaries.

Unlike the evangelicals, Mormons believe in progressive revelation, and this makes them great innovators. These innovations range from the grand to the small, the smallest (to my mind) being the rebuke (Doctrine and Covenants 132:52) issued to Emma Smith, Mormon church founder Joseph Smith's first wife. Emma, it seems, was less than thrilled when Joseph started to bring new wives home, and needed to be reminded "to receive all those that have been given unto my servant Joseph ..."

It was another of Smith's revelations, dating from the late 1830s, that touched off the Mormons' mania for genealogy. "The Saints," Smith wrote in 1840, "have the privilege of being baptized for those of their relatives who are dead, whom they believe would have embraced the Gospel, if they had been privileged with hearing it." This sent the faithful back to their family Bibles for the names and dates of their ancestors. The great genealogical treasure hunt had begun.

In 1918, the Mormons expanded their mission, trawling for names among non- Mormons and baptizing them once their exact place in the tree of life had been determined. The practice continues to this day, spurred on by the wish to save as many souls as possible.

This mission to the dead is not without its critics. Everyone, even the Mormons, can agree that things went too far when the Jews who perished in the Holocaust were posthumously baptized.

But whatever one's personal views on the Mormons, it is impossible not to admire the energy they have brought to the task of identifying "all the people who have ever lived." To date they have two billion names on record, one billion of whom have been determined to be unique (alas, the church has more than a hundred billion to go if it is to account for every human being to have graced this weary planet).

The Mormons have amassed a lot of names - no doubt about that - but how reliable are they? It is an important question because the church's records have become a staple for amateur genealogists, and Akenson, historian that he is, would like to see other historians make better use of them. (Akenson's curiosity about the Mormons was piqued when he was writing about the Irish in Ontario and the local Mormons came to his rescue, providing him with copies of local land titles.) The first point is that the later the record, the likelier it is to be accurate. Non-Mormons, in other words, are the real beneficiaries of the church's database because the entries for their ancestors tend to be based on secular records and not on entries in the proverbial family Bible.

The second point is that in this, as in any other research endeavour, you need to double-check everything. Though the Mormons have instituted an admirable double-blind system for vetting new names, slipups are inevitable, and Akenson gives a few that are absolute howlers. The most laughable by far are the attempts to find a genealogy for the Norse gods Odin and Frigg, reported as having lived in "Asgard, Asia, or Eastern Europe."

The third problem, one that need not vex amateur genealogists, is that the Mormon understanding of time is, of course, anti-evolutionary. It is based, moreover, on the weakest of foundations: James Ussher's historical chronology. Ussher was the 17th-century archbishop of Armaghm whose life's work was to determine the exact date of creation. One need only read Hugh Trevor-Roper's essay on the subject to realize that the good archbishop was cutting corners, and once this is admitted, the whole edifice must come crashing down.

But again, these are matters that need not vex the genealogists, who are, I suspect, the real market for this excellent book. But I can also heartily recommend it to anyone who would like to know more about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, about where it came from and what it stands for and why it is adding new members even you are reading the weekend papers.

- Jessica Warner, The Globe & Mail, Saturday, 1 December 2007

Akenson's "Some Family", a review from the Montreal Review of Books

A recent review of Akenson's Some Family from the Montreal Review of Books --

"The Mormon Genealogical Project (once called the International Genealogical Index) started in 1894, and was grown to be the world's largest collection of genealogical data. Most genealogists, it is safe to say, use the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints' material with unquestionning gratitude. Akenson's evaluation of the material -- how it has been collected, and how it is used -- should give them pause. One of the central themes of this book is that there are four main genealogical forms whereas the LDS material uses only one. There are other cautionary tales to be found in the appendices, including the statistical likelihood of false paternity, wrongly attributed maternity, and incest blurring the nice, neat family tree. Akenson's insistence on the family as narrative is an evocative one, the "kernel" of each tale leading to the kernel of the next. His scholarly insistence on referring to "Yeshua of Nazareth" and "Miriam" can grate, but he is an equal-opportunity offender: Catholics, Jews, Mormons, genealogists, and historians can all find something to be annoyed about. They can also find much to chuckle about as Akenson is a witty and charming writer. This book should be required reading not only for all genealogists, but also for all those bureaucrats who mistakenly believe that the microfiche copies the LDS members provided of the the original books of record are the real deal."

- Montreal Review of Books

Akenson's "Some Family", a review from the Maclean's Web site

"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