Read The Invisible History of the Human Race for Free Online Page A

great-great-grandfather must have lived. There had once been a vibrant Jewish community there. Unusually, the Jewish cemetery was still intact: “We were crawling around again, it was totally overgrown, lots of stones fallen over but mostly in one piece.” They had a translator with them to help find the gravestones for the family, including one for Roth’s great-great-grandfather. When Roth saw it, she realized that it also held the name of her great-great-great-grandfather. It was the first time she had learned his name.
    It was “unbelievable,” she said. “Absolutely unbelievable. I was in tears.” Why was this encounter so emotional? “It’s a feeling of breaking through a wall. Of the frustration of wanting to know more about your family and your past and what people’s lives were like, and where they came from, and who they were, and what their personal stories were, and feeling like you’re never going to be able to uncover that. Once you have that feeling of that great mystery, any piece of information feels like a treasure trove. Whether it’s a name or a place where somebody once was, it’s a form of a connection that you thought you were never going to have.”
    Roth interviewed many people who traced their family histories (see more on this in chapter 12), and she was always struck by the difficulty they had explaining what exactly compelled them. “With avid genealogists and especially genetic genealogists, I try to get at the question of why they are interested,” she said. “What is amazing to me is that people can’t articulate it. It’s like it is such a basic urge or a basic primal interest that they have a really hard time putting it into words. Some people try, and they’ll give you answers that sound a little clichéd. They’ll talk about wanting to find their own place in history, or wanting to know where they came from, or they’ll talk about it making history more interesting to them, but the level of commitment of a lot of people means to me that it must go deeper than that.”
    I came across Wendy Roth when I started looking for general studies of genealogy. Someone, I reasoned, must have investigated the psychology of family history or, surely, examined how different philosophies of heredity have shaped this ubiquitous human experience. I asked genealogists, geneticists, historians, and others whose work invoked in some way questions of inheritance and history, but none could point me to a body of work on which he or she relied.
    Apart from Roth, a few scholars have investigated the topic, but usually only briefly and in isolation. This seemed odd. After all, historians acknowledge that attitudes and even feelings are passed down culturally. Economists study the way socioeconomic status, especially poverty, is reproduced. Psychologists, social scientists, and even English professors recognize that the family is a powerful engine of inheritance. Most scholars of human behavior accept that individuals are shaped in some way by the people who raised them and that even a family unit may possess a character. Yet there was apparently no field that brought together all these ideas about inheritance.
     • • • 
    Like Roth, I became my own family’s historian. But even though the fragments of past generations I glimpsed struck me as wondrous, I did not dig down for a long time. When I did begin to look further into my family’s past, I experienced a strange array of emotions, including relief and contentment, but there was despair too.
    I found myself drawn to one ancestor and then another, and sometimes a single detail was all it took for me to feel, at least for a little while, that I had a relationship with them. The day I realized that I could learn about Julia Dillon, my father’s great-grandmother, was a revelation to me. She was one of my sixteen great-grandparents, and I had heard her name many times but knew nothing about her. I couldn’t explain why I had never