The Invisible History of the Human Race (17 page)

But is that a good thing or a bad thing? The past is, of course, gone, and all that we have left is information about it—which means that our relationship with the
past is a relationship with
records
of it. But if that is the case, does that mean that these companies are charging us admission to history?

In fact, many archivists believe that Ancestry.com and their kin have made a positive contribution to the world of records. By streamlining and packaging documents so that millions of people can find their antecedents, the companies have created a completely new way of interacting with history. Still, archivist Cassandra Findlay told me there has been growing concern about the presence of these companies in government archives. When utilities, toll roads, or other public assets are sold off to private concerns, there is usually considerable public debate, said Findlay, yet on this issue there has been none. Over the last few years, she explained, “Companies have stealthily crept in and struck deals on a one-to-one basis, and it has been invisible to governments and to the public.” Part of the problem is that it’s not yet entirely clear what we might be losing if governments allow archives to be completely shaped by market forces rather than considerations about heritage. But even if the more specific risks are unclear, the general concerns should be obvious. The records, said Findlay, “represent access to memory, rights, entitlements, and accountability. They really belong to everyone. I’m not saying we shouldn’t strike deals with these companies. But there should be more conscious decision making.”

Still, if companies were not able to use the records to make money, few people would ever see them. It may not be too long before the value of records becomes more obvious to everyone. In just the last few years a number of very different projects have demonstrated what data-based history can tell us—even when it is data that’s been pulled together by the most maligned researcher of all, the family genealogist.

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Yaniv Erlich, a researcher at the Whitehead Institute, collaborated with Geni.com, the genealogical Web site, to take data from forty-three million genealogical profiles and map it. Erlich and his colleagues plotted the birth dates of all the individuals in Geni’s ancestors database on a map of the world. It turns out when you put this data together, you get a dynamic and fairly accurate picture of the history of the world, or rather of historical events that have been written down.

In order to make the data visual, the researchers divided it up into ten-year segments. They then created a video of a world map, on which a tiny dot glows to represent each individual born in that decade (whose birth was recorded). Each dot eventually fades as the next “generation” appears in the subsequent decade. The pulsing glow that results charts the movement of people all over the world. At the end of the fifteenth century, when Columbus sailed from Spain to North America, pricks of light begin to shine there. They increase in 1620 when the
Mayflower
arrives. A few decades later light illuminates the coast of South Africa when the Dutch land there. Next the British East India Company begins to send its people to India. In 1788 specks of lights begin to cluster on Australia’s southeast coast when the British land there. Meanwhile, the sheet of light that has formed along the east coast of North America begins spreading westward. In 1836 a thin line of light arcs out from the sheet as pioneers begin to journey along the Oregon Trail.

The flow of movement over Erlich’s light map illustrates migrations with which we are already familiar from written history. But remember, the data points that are the source of these glowing episodes were not culled directly from official documents but rather from family trees submitted by Geni’s users. No doubt many of those trees are incomplete and contain some inaccuracies, but in the aggregate, a true history of the world emerges out of this collection of individual family histories.

The sociologist Wendy Roth said that in her field, one of the reasons that amateur research is regarded so dismissively is that it is considered “me-search”: “It’s research on ‘me,’” she explained. “It’s not really about broader themes and trends and theories; it’s just about you and your particular little minute spot in history.”

No doubt this is true of some genealogy. But with the massive digitization of all this family information (and, as will be discussed in chapter 8, DNA), it’s becoming clear that in the aggregate there are extraordinary things to be said about collective genealogies.

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The most ambitious genealogy in the world, at least the world’s first very ambitious genealogy, is found in Iceland. Ingólfur Arnarson first settled the island in 874, after which some Icelanders sailed for distant shores and brought back slaves and concubines. The island was also visited by the occasional pirate or fisherman, but nevertheless the population has been relatively isolated, and today it is one of the more closely related populations in Europe. Icelanders have kept a remarkably detailed set of records since the beginning of their history. Some family chronicles date back as far as 1650, and in some cases to the eighth and ninth centuries. Genealogical information was recorded in historical documents, like the Book of Settlement, or Landnámabók, and the Family Sagas, or Íslendingasögur.

These ancient records have now been combined with church registers and censuses into an online database called Íslendingabók, or the Book of Icelanders. The total number of people born in Iceland since Norse settlement is about 1.3 million, and an utterly staggering half of these people are recorded in the Íslendingabók. (Iceland has had its share of plagues and volcanic eruptions; the living individuals recorded in the Íslendingabók represent only a subset of families from the early era that survived into the twenty-first century.) The director of the software company that assembled Íslendingabók, himself a family genealogist, said that digitizing all the records was like “working out
a puzzle the size of a football stadium, with half the pieces missing and the rest randomly scattered.”

When it first went online, a friend who lived in Reykjavík told me, it became a kind of dinner-party game, with everyone checking to see how they were related to one another. A Gallup poll in 2000 found that over 80 percent of Icelanders were enthusiastic about the project, but others felt there was something sinister in it. According to one op-ed, “
Now a company in Iceland is recording in one place every piece of information documented in previously published works, including genealogies . . . and censuses. Unfortunately the company is doing this without asking anybody.” Traditionally genealogical information has been in the public domain in Iceland, but increasingly it is being restricted. In 2013, however, some enterprising young Icelanders invented an app for mobile devices that could instantly calculate how closely related are, say, two people who met in a bar. If they bumped phones, the app would wirelessly match their identity in the Íslendingabók. The app’s most talked-about feature was “incest prevention.” “
Accidentally sleeping with a relative has been a running joke in Icelandic culture for a while,” one of the creators told the press. “Bump in the app before you bump in bed,” they advised.

Large genealogies such as this are useful for learning about populations as well as individuals. In a similarly ambitious project in Canada, researchers used the genealogical data of more than one million Canadians to see if the choices made by different generations of European settlers had any impact on their descendants.

Quebec City was founded in 1608, and over the next ninety years the population steadily grew. Overall more than thirty thousand pioneering farmers from Europe settled northeastern Quebec before the end of the eighteenth century. Many of the earlier pioneers traveled from the city into the Canadian wilderness and established farms there. Others who arrived later tended to stay in the towns. To understand the forces that shaped the population, Damian Labuda and his colleagues used Quebec’s extraordinary BALSAC population database, which includes official birth, death, and marriage records from 1680 to 1970. All of the individuals in the database are listed by the parish in which they lived—underlining the significance of religion as an organizer of human life—and all of the records are arranged in such a way that researchers could recreate the networks of family that existed over the three centuries that the database represents. They identified all the couples who married between 1686 and 1960 in the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region and then traced their descendants. Altogether, Labuda said, they looked at 1.8 million individuals and
eighty-eight thousand marriages.

Labuda found out that the genetic rewards went to the bold: The pioneers who led the front wave of settlers, abandoning the more comfortable villages for the wild and establishing farms and families there, had more children than those who stayed behind in the cities. Not only did those first pioneers have more children, but their children also had more children, as did their grandchildren, and so on, which means that most of the current population of the Saguenay-Lac-St-Jean region can trace its roots back to the first wave of pioneer settlement, and not necessarily to the tens of thousands of otherwise perfectly healthy individuals who arrived some time later.

The progeny of the later arrivals have not disappeared from history altogether, though, as both the front and following waves contributed DNA to the current population. However, there were fewer of the latter, and their descendants had relatively fewer descendants. In fact, the front wave’s genetic legacy was up to four times as large.

While it’s often claimed that originally about nine thousand people founded the entire French Canadian population, this work reveals that there are patterns within patterns, and within all of French Canada some regions and some individuals from the founding population had a greater impact than their contemporaries because of their choices. While
the population boom in all of Quebec was “spectacular,” said Labuda, it was even more extraordinary in Saguenay, with a population of 10,000 people in 1850 and a population of 250,000 in 1950, a twenty-five-fold increase in one hundred years, mostly from local births. Given that a large part of the history of humanity, recorded or not, involves migrations into new territories, settlement, and then expansion outward again, the pattern may have important implications for groups in the past and the present.

The researchers found that the early women pioneers had 15 percent more children than the later ones; in addition, 20 percent more of their children married. Partly this may be due to the fact that women on the leading edge of the wave got married about a year earlier than the later arrivals. They bore children sooner, and they continued to bear children longer. It’s possible that families who left the towns were not as exposed to the illness and disease that spread more easily in congested towns. In addition, Labuda speculates, in comparison to young people in the Old World, who had fewer children because there was much less to bequeath to them, young pioneers had more children simply because they could—there was more space to have a large family and more land to sustain them.

It’s not clear how long this particular front-wave effect will last. Will it always be true that the population of the region has more DNA that can be traced back to the first pioneers than to those of any subsequent groups—will the DNA simply be recirculated throughout the area? Or do other huge events, subsequent migrations, or other factors have the power to change the pattern? Labuda’s next project may throw more light on the issue. He and his colleagues plan to link multiple sets of historical data to create a coherent genealogy for the entire historical population of Quebec from 1800 up to and including its present-day population of five million people. Similar projects are taking place on a smaller scale in parishes and villages in Finland, Italy, and Tunisia and in groups like the Amish in the United States and the Hutterites in Canada.

Population geneticists have long been interested in the patterns that arise when a species expands its range, but for the most part they have been able to study this only in animals that have a quick generational turnover. In the case of the Quebec study, the patterns would not have been discovered if people hadn’t filled in their census forms—and in the case of the Geni history of the world, if they hadn’t done their “me-search.” But it’s not just the records of families or the data gathered by genealogists that are now changing the way history and science are done; it’s genealogists themselves.

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Blurring the boundaries between family history, personal history, and social history is a project founded by University of Melbourne historian Janet McCalman. The goal of Founders and Survivors is to build detailed biographies of Tasmania’s nineteenth-century convicts in order to chart the variety of paths they took and to discover patterns in the population as a whole. Despite the fact that generations of schoolchildren have studied Australia’s convict past, McCalman explains that little was known about the vast majority of convicts after they left the system. “The ones we do know about were
the exceptional people: the success stories, the winners. Until now, we have had little idea how many were losers in later life and whether there were effects or not, down through the generations.”

Historians tend not to examine the fate of nineteenth-century populations exhaustively, partly because there aren’t good enough records available through which to track them. McCalman focused on Tasmania’s convict records because they are not only complete but also exceptionally detailed, including individual convicts’ height, eye color, level of literacy, general disposition, and family background. Most important, the records have been made available online. Now anyone can sit back after dinner in the privacy of his or her home and—laptop at hand—unearth long-forgotten stories of hardship and adventure. McCalman capitalized on this by gathering a group of citizen-historians to crowdsource the past.

McCalman’s volunteers, who each chose and researched a convict ship sent to Van Diemen’s Land, are typically genealogists and descendants of the convicts. They try to find out what happened to every convict by trawling through census records in the United Kingdom, convict registers, old newspapers, and records of births, deaths, and marriages. Each ship is a “floating laboratory,” and each group of convicts is a sample of humanity put through an extraordinary experiment in human resilience.