Genealogy, Volume 2, Issue 4 (December 2018) – 21 articles

By all rights, I should be dead. Not once, but a number of times. On 23 March 1979, as a 24-year-old, I witnessed and photographed the brutal beating of a young man in a sarape by some 10–12 Sheriff’s deputies on Whittier Blvd in East Los Angeles. In turn, the deputies turned on me with their riot sticks cracked my skull, and sent me to the hospital, charging me with attempting to kill 4 of the deputies. On my arrest report, it stated that I was the leader of a gang of 10–15 Mexicans. With active death threats from the original Sheriff’s deputies that drove me to the jail ward of the LA County Hospital, I was subsequently arrested/detained some 60 additional times, primarily by Sheriff’s deputies and LAPD officers. By the end of the year, the criminal charges were dropped and 6 years after that, I emerged victorious in a lawsuit. That was a generation ago. No. That was at least two generations ago. I healed long ago from PTSD, though the brutality I witnessed and lived continues to reside within me, intergenerationally. This defies explanation. I am healed, yet the trauma continues to live within my body, even some 40 years after the fact. My life thereafter has been dedicated to the elimination not only of this brutality, but also a trauma that I can literally trace to 1492 on this continent through my studies on this topic. How do the Red-Black-Brown communities of this nation heal when that brutality and that memory have always been present intergenerationally and are not going away anytime soon? I want to explore the tension between fighting for the elimination of law enforcement abuse and living with that intergenerational trauma. The subtext of [anti-indigenous] racial profiling as used against Mexicans in this society, from police to immigration agents to the media, will be examined in this first-person article. How the survivors of this brutality and their families, who have lost loved ones and who fight against this brutality live with these traumas—particularly with the knowledge that as a result of impunity, there is no end in sight to this brutality—will also be examined. Full article

This paper is an initial exploration of an under researched area in the field of contemporary adoption—the impact of class on adoptive family life. The first part of the paper argues that whilst class is structurally present in adoption work, the effects of class difference have been a neglected dimension of practice. This neglect of class in adoption reflects its elision in the wider social field. It isn’t that class stratification has materially or economically disappeared but that the inequalities it installs are concealed through a new privileging of individualism. This individualizing of social problems places new regimes of responsibility upon both individuals and parents. This section concludes with an exploration of the intensive field of contemporary parenting, where social background is considered unimportant. It is argued that attachment theory has become a dominant paradigm for parenting in both adoption and the wider social field because its classed notions of parenting are concealed. The second part of the paper draws upon a small scale qualitative study with one local authority adoption team where adoptive parents and birth parents were interviewed about class and parenting. Working classness assumed a structuring importance in terms of the interview material, as most participants were from this class background. Two areas are particularly foregrounded: the degree to which adopted children’s class differences are interpreted as attachment difficulties and the degree to which middle-classness operates as a silent measure for successful parenting in substitute care. Full article

In this article, we use the results from two studies, one on interracial relationship and the other on transnational adoption, to explore how notions of race and ethnicity shape family policies, family building and everyday life in Sweden. Transnational adoption and interracial marriage in Sweden have previously never been compared in research, even though they both are about transracial family formation. By bringing these two topics together in a critical race theory framework we got a deeper understanding of how transracial families are perceived and affected by societal beliefs and norms. The analysis revealed a somewhat contradictory and complex picture on the norms of family formation. The color-blind ideology that characterizes the Swedes’ self-understanding, together with the privileged position of whiteness in relation to Swedishness, makes the attitude towards different forms of transracial families ambivalent and contradictory. Transracial children and their parents are perceived differently depending on their origin and degree of visible differences and non-whiteness, but also based on the historical and social context. Since family formation involves an active choice, the knowledge and discussion on how race and whiteness norms structure our thoughts and behavior are essential in today’s multicultural Sweden. Full article

Uruu patrilineages and genealogical narratives about them are important aspects of Kyrgyz social practice and reflect some tensions and contradictions in contemporary Kyrgyz self-understanding and identities. This article explores the complex relationship of patrilineal kinship to historical knowledge and lived social experience in northwestern Kyrgyzstan. The contrasting situations of men and women within patrilineages are analyzed to reveal the shifting relationships of gender, genealogy and patrilineal kinship. Local meanings and uses of genealogy and history are shown to differ from those developed at the national level as part of Kyrgyz nation-building: Narratives about local lineages and their heroes portray different sacred and social worlds than those about the hierarchical world of elite politics and the military feats of national heroes. Full article

Selecting national emblems is crucial for the development of a national identity. This paper presents all official proposals for the coat of arms of the Republic of Macedonia, starting in 1992, with the proposals of the public competition for the selection of the coat of arms, flag, and anthem of the Republic of Macedonia, and finishing with the last Government proposal in 2014. All of the proposals are categorized according to their main symbol, a sun or a lion. The long and complex process of creating national symbols shows that there is a deep division regarding which one to use. Full article

The Immigrant Ancestors Project (IAP) is sponsored by the Center for Family History and Genealogy at Brigham Young University, which is located in Provo, Utah, United States. For eighteen years, students have served summer internships in Europe to acquire images of emigration records, focusing on those containing information about the emigrant’s hometown. In a mentored-learning environment, hundreds of students have worked on this index to help people all over the world discover their ancestors’ hometowns. The IAP database currently contains over 900,000 names, and it is available to the public free of charge. This paper discusses the history of IAP, as well as the benefits to those who use this significant online index. Full article

Little has been taught about the Armenian Genocide of 1915 when approximately 1.5 million Armenians were brutally slaughtered. Moreover, the events are still being denied today. Community College Math Professor Barbara Erysian, an unlikely candidate to tell the story, carries the memories and sorrow of her people. She has dedicated herself to telling the story of how her grandmother survived the genocide. The story, repeatedly told to her as a child, is very much a part of her identity. Her essay describes some of the terrors of 1915. She believes the memory and pain of the Armenian Genocide must be told so that these crimes are never forgotten. Full article

Trauma is a central concept in the historiography of the Holocaust. In both the historiographical and the psychoanalytical research on the subject, the Holocaust is perceived not as a finite event that took place in the past, but as one that continues to exist and to affect the families of survivors and the Jewish people. In the 1950s–1960s, evidence began emerging that Holocaust trauma was not limited to the survivors themselves, but was passed on to the next generation born after the Holocaust and raised in its shadow. It is possible to see the effects of growing up in the shadow of the Holocaust and transgenerational transmission of trauma in many aspects of the second-generation children’s lives. In this article, I examine the representations of these symptoms in David Grossman’s novel See Under: Love, which deals with the subject of the Holocaust through the perspective of Momik, a child of Holocaust survivors. Grossman teaches us that writing itself has the potential to heal. He also shows us that every one of us contains both victim and aggressor, and that, under certain circumstances, the “Nazi beast” may awaken within each of us. Full article

The vast popularity of the Game of Thrones franchise has drawn a new and diverse audience to the fantasy genre. Within the pseudo-medieval world created by G.R.R. Martin, a great deal of detail has gone into establishing coats of arms for the characters and families that are depicted. These arms fulfill an extremely important role, both within the arc of the story and as part of the marketing collateral of this very successful series. This article examines the role of arms in the Game of Thrones universe and explores how the heraldic system transcends the usual genealogical display and functions more as a type of familial branding. An exploration of some of the practices and idiosyncrasies of heraldry in the franchise shows that whilst Martin sets his foundation firmly in the traditional, he then extends this into the fanciful; in much the same manner as he does with other faux-historical aspects of his work. This study is valuable because Game of Thrones has brought heraldry from being a niche interest to something that is now consumed by a global audience of hundreds of millions of people. Several of the fantasy blazons in the series are now arguably the most recognisable coats of arms in history. Full article

Direct-to-consumer genetic ancestry testing is a new and growing industry that has gained widespread media coverage and public interest. Its scientific base is in the fields of population and evolutionary genetics and it has benefitted considerably from recent advances in rapid and cost-effective DNA typing technologies. There is a considerable body of scientific literature on the use of genetic data to make inferences about human population history, although publications on inferring the ancestry of specific individuals are rarer. Population geneticists have questioned the scientific validity of some population history inference approaches, particularly those of a more interpretative nature. These controversies have spilled over into commercial genetic ancestry testing, with some companies making sensational claims about their products. One such company—BritainsDNA—made a number of dubious claims both directly to its customers and in the media. Here we outline our scientific concerns, document the exchanges between us, BritainsDNA and the BBC, and discuss the issues raised about media promotion of commercial enterprises, academic freedom of expression, science and pseudoscience and the genetic ancestry testing industry. We provide a detailed account of this case as a resource for historians and sociologists of science, and to shape public understanding, media reporting and scientific scrutiny of the commercial use of population and evolutionary genetics. Full article

With the overwhelming popularity of genealogy-themed television series, genetic genealogy testing, online subscription services for research, and the enduring aphorism of Sankofa, people of African descent are consistently dispelling the long-avowed assertion that the ancestry of the enslaved in the United States and their descendants is, for the most part, unknowable. [...] Full article

The United States, according to sociologist Seymour Martin Lipset, was the ‘first new nation’. It may be at least anticipated, therefore, that genealogy, history, and the narration of time would prove more than usually complicated in a political state united across time and space solely by a civic idealism, and a people bound together only by what president Abraham Lincoln romantically described as ‘mystic chords of memory’. In order to probe the nationalist lineaments of America’s particular approach to locating the nation in time and in tradition, this paper traces a genealogy of American nationalism by interrogating three specific national discourses that have been of significance to the United States since its colonial beginnings. First, the identification of America as the New Israel in the New World; the attempt to inscribe the nation into spiritual, Biblical time. Second, the racial distinctions that America deployed to sustain a civic version of ethnic genealogical determinants, and to construct a coherent narrative of national lineage that embedded its citizens in time and space. And, finally, the role that conflict played, and still plays as both a central core and historical framework for both the narration, and the collapsing of time in the United States today. Full article

One might perceive the Middle Ages as an era of certain rights and privileges. Social stratification or the conformation of a group’s identity were all established around privileges in the Kingdom of Hungary. In the medieval period, as opposed to a modern state, the most important constructors of a group’s identity were privileges. When members of a social group bear identical prerogatives, that group can be recognized as an order or estate. The ecclesiastic order existed side-by-side with the noble estate. In possession of political power were strictly those who were at the top of the strongly hierarchical system. However, in the Kingdom of Hungary, the significance of the ecclesiastical order was dwarfed by the importance of landed nobility. Some five percent of the population was of nobles, who also held political power. Until the end of the 15th century, the members of this stratum were equal in law. Only distinctions in financial situation can be noticed during the 14th and 15th centuries. The first law differentiating the rights within nobility was enacted by the national assembly, the diet of Wladislaus II (1490–1516), in 1498. Only from then on can we speak of gentry and aristocracy. This almost two-century-long process can be observed by examining a representational tool, the usage of red wax in seals. Upon studying medieval Hungarian history, we must use all sources available due to their rapid destruction, hence examining seal usage to explain aristocratic representation. In this paper, we briefly summarize the social structure of medieval Hungary and its traditions in seal usage, and present several unique seals. Our goal is to highlight some connections that historiography would benefit from, to provide new data, and to arouse the interest of a broad spectrum of audiences in Hungarian social history. Full article

Life writing scholar Julia Watson critiques the practice of genealogy as “in every sense conservative” (300) because it traditionally charts and enshrines a family’s collective biography through biologistic, heteronormative, and segregated routes. My Americanist contribution, however, zooms in on a recent development of autobiographical works that establish narratives of origin beyond normative boundaries of race and heterosexual reproduction. A number of predominantly white queer parents of black adoptees have turned their family history into children’s read-along books as a medium for pedagogical empowerment that employs first-person narration in the presumable voice of the adoptee. In Arwen and Her Daddies (2009), for instance, Arwen invites the reader into a story of family formation with the following opening words: “Do you know how I and my Dads became a family?” My analysis understands these objects as verbal-visual origin stories which render intelligible a conversion from differently racialized strangers into kin. I frame this mode of narration as ‘adoptee ventriloquism’ that might tell us more about adult desires of queers for familial recognition than about the needs of their adopted children. Full article

John Pelan, Director of the Scottish Council on Archives (SCA), explores some of the challenges around searching Scotland’s archives online. Difficulties in accessing information, knowing what exists and where to find it, and the multiplicity of online catalogues can be confusing and frustrating for users, particularly inexperienced and amateur family historians. The article provides information about the Scottish Council on Archives (SCA) plans, working in partnership with a wide range of stakeholders, to create a new portal for accessing Scotland’s archive collections including those of universities, local authorities, businesses and communities. The portal, which will be a development of the existing Scottish Archive Network resource, will allow users to search across many catalogues for both collection and item level records. The new portal will be an invaluable resource for genealogists, researchers, academics, students, historians and members of the public by providing guidance on understanding, using and accessing archives. SCA expects that the site will become a powerful advocacy tool for archives, showing not just the breadth and depth of collections across Scotland but highlighting the many ways that archives can be used inform and improve society. For genealogists, but also for everyday users of archives as well as potential new users, this portal will open new channels of research and local history. Full article

There has been a number of studies on the outcomes of adoption reunions, most of which have focussed on relatively ‘fresh’ reunions. Very few studies have looked at long-term outcomes. Fewer still have discussed reunions and kinship with controversy over firstly, the longevity of reunions, and secondly, what such reunions might engender regarding the relative kinship statuses of adoptive and birth families. This paper critically discusses the existing literature on reunions and kinship, and then reports on the long-term outcomes of 200 ‘matches’ on the Adoption Contact Register for Scotland between 1996–2006, presenting qualitative detail from the 75 respondents who completed questionnaires and sent in stories. The paper invites us to think about how adoption can form an adoptive family and deform a birth family, and how adoption reunions re-form both and everyone included. However, it will especially focus on what a coming together of two people separated by adoption means for the way that they frame their relationship with each other and those around them. Full article

William Gage’s Geborener Deutscher, a print newsletter distributed by traditional mail from the late 1980s until 2003, and the eponymous Internet forum Gage established in 2000 on Yahoo Groups, provide search resources and community support specifically for German born adoptees. The archived newsletters and conversations offer early insight into the search and reunion activities of many who were transnationally adopted to the United States as infants and small children in the wake of the Second World War. Among Gage’s mailing list and Yahoo Group subscribers are members of the post-war cohort of Black German Americans living in Germany and in the US. Gage’s archive provides a unique opportunity to begin to explore Black German adoptee search, reunion, and community development over nearly a two-decade span. Full article

The members of the Torroja family were extremely important as advisers on political and military strategy to the counts of Barcelona (monarchs of the Crown of Aragon) Arnaldo was elected Grand Master of the Knights Templar (1181–1184). On 30 September 1184, the Templar Master passed away in the city of Veneto; Arnaldo de Torroja was buried at the church of San Vitale in Verona. The church was destroyed when the river Adige flooded it in the 18th century, and it was closed down in 1760 as a result of the damage caused. Some years ago, behind a wall, a sarcophagus was discovered on which was carved the typical Templar cross (Cross patty) and, in 2016, it was opened by a team of Italian scientists. The skeletal remains corresponded to the age Arnaldo. Thanks to the book that I recently published “Armorial de los Obispos de Barcelona, siglos XII–XXI”, it has been realized that the sarcophagus of the brother of Arnaldo of Torroja, Guillermo is contained within the Family heraldry “Golden a castle of Gules”, they requested that the aforementioned bishop’s remains be analysed, in order to compare them with those of Arnaldo. Full article

Coats of arms have, from their first appearance, been one of the primary visual expressions of a person’s lineage and indirectly of status. Individual members of a lineage had a choice: They could use the arms adopted by an ancestor with or without a mark of difference; or they could adopt one of their own design. Several systems for marking difference have been described, but evidence for a family tradition is usually sparse and spotty. The factors and forces limiting a choice are not known. The use of arms by the broader family of the Beauchamp, Earls of Warwick, is an example of how different branches used primary changes of design, as well as the use of smallish figures for secondary difference. The variants of the Beauchamp arms have previously been presented, but only documented in select individual cases. In this article, the problems of evidence, description, and assignment are discussed, in relation to anonymous or similar named individuals of different branches and generations. Seals and entries in armorials are reviewed, and marks of difference used by, or attributed to, individuals are documented. Full article

A great deal of both scholarly and public attention has been paid to questions of nature versus nurture in understanding identity and family construction in adoptees, yet much less attention has been given to the ways that power shapes the social reproduction of families through adoption. In this feminist interdisciplinary self-reflexive ethnographic research, I enter the world of online genealogy sites to critically explore the social practice of constructing a family tree as an adoptee. I explore genealogy as a culturally and historically specific representation of patriarchal heteronormative whiteness. I argue that adoptees’ liminal locations between socially understood categories of nature and nurture embedded in online family heritage websites make evident the ways that genealogical templates and stories reproduce mainstream family ideology through the erasure of “illegitimacy”. I consider what I found in my adoptive family history, critically exploring my “legitimate” relationship to my family in relation to the “illegitimate” (and unrecognized) relationship between my family and an enslaved child transferred as property between family members in 1813. This research makes visible power inequalities governing family reproduction at macro levels by exploring the contradictions and slippages regarding family “legitimacy” in micro level online genealogical constructions of adoptees’ family trees. Full article

National identities are social phenomena with concrete—both political and social—effects in society, but a fundamental part of their constitution takes place through narratives about the collective. The existence of collective identities thus depends on drawing boundaries between the collective ‘we’ and the ‘others’, as well as on disseminating coherent ideas about the fundamental identity of the we-group. These narratives thus constitute a privileged object for investigating how collective identities are constructed and legitimised in a discourse that places the collective in time, that is, with a coherent and logical narrative about the past and a trustworthy projection into the future. This article defends, first, the concept of the ‘master narrative’ as a useful analytical category for investigating how national history is constructed, and, second, the concepts of ‘sites of memory’ and ‘Vergangenheitsbewältigung’ as means of accessing this narrative. These concepts represent instances of creation and rewriting, respectively, of the narrative and are thus useful tools for analysing how a sense of connectedness with the community through time is created: that is, how a sense of continuity with certain distant epochs is conveyed, and how, on the other hand, a sense of discontinuity with other periods is favoured. Full article