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obituaries announced the death of Essie Mae Washington-Williams, who was born in 1925 in Aiken, South Carolina. In 2003 Washington-Williams announced at a press conference that she was the illegitimate daughter of Strom Thurmond, a white American congressman, and Carrie Butler, an African American teen who worked as a maid in the Thurmond household. By the time Washington-Williams was in her early twenties, Thurmond was governor of South Carolina. Later he became a long-standing senator in the U.S. Congress and at one time ran for the office of U.S. president. A strict segregationist, he said: “All the laws of Washington and all the bayonets of the Army cannot force the Negro into our homes, our schools, our churches and our places of recreation and amusement.”
    Washington-Williams waited until Thurmond died before she publicly revealed that he was her father. “My children deserve the right to know from whom, where and what they have come,” she said. “I am committed in teaching them and helping them to learn about their past. It is their right to know and understand the rich history of their ancestry, black and white.” Washington-Williams was a mother of four, a grandmother of thirteen, and a great-grandmother of four by the time she wrote her memoir in 2005. It’s hard to imagine her descendants feeling nothing as they think about her past.
    When she finished her historic announcement, the elegant and assured Washington-Williams spoke of the “great sense of peace” that came over her when she decided to share the details of her family’s history. For some, no doubt for many, the details of their own lineage, and certainly that of others, may be banal. But when those details are lost or suppressed, they can take on an enormous power.
     • • • 
    Perhaps neither question—
Why should we feel proud?
or
Why shouldn’t we feel proud?
—can take us far. But it is surely interesting to ask,
Why
do
we feel proud?
because quite clearly many people do. Even Lewontin allows that all cultures in every era have been interested in ancestry. Were they motivated by pride, sorrow, amusement, or curiosity? It’s surprisingly hard to answer this question.
    Wendy Roth, a professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia, says that when she was a little girl, she wanted to be a genealogist when she grew up: “I was always the family record keeper.” But Roth’s family was Jewish, and because of the disruptions of World War II they didn’t know much about earlier generations. “There is a sense that other people can do genealogy, but for us the records are gone,” Roth explained. “I have one friendship with a woman in England who traced her family back to the 1500s and I’ve always lived a little vicariously through her.”
    Once, when Roth was backpacking in Europe, she visited Rymanów, Poland, the town that had been home to one of her great-grandfathers. The only traces of the Jewish community that once lived there were the ruins of a synagogue. Roth met a man who must have been in his eighties, and they communicated in a traveler’s mix of drawing and impromptu sign language. She told him she wanted to find the old Jewish cemetery, and he led her up a steep hillside. “It was hard for me to keep up with him,” she recalled. “He was so spry.” They reached an area of chest-high weeds where the cemetery had been, and he mimed to her that he was a small child during the war. “He acted out that in this cemetery the Nazis had come, and they had lined up Jews, and then opened fire on all of them, and then they took the gravestones and used them to pave a road.” Roth’s guide then pointed to the road the Nazis had built, which lay beneath them, down the hill.
    To feel that she finally stood somewhere that her ancestors had stood was an extraordinary experience for Roth. About fifteen years later, she and her husband traveled to Švencionys, Lithuania, where, she believed, a