May 28, 2007
The ultimate social network
It is said that researching family history is second only to scouring the web for porn in popularity. I'm not sure if that's true, but I can see how it might be so. If ever there was a medium perfectly suited to establishing lineage and contact with unknown family it is the Internet.
I've always had a simmering interest in genealogy, but the sorry state of family tree applications never got me very excited. These were almost always legacy beasts that could import the archaic GEDCOM standard file format and do little more. Where these apps really failed was in areas of collaboration and visualization. What good is a family tree if you are the only person who can work on it? And, much thornier, how do you slice and dice such a fractal dataset so that it is actually useful?
In recent years Ancestry.com has stepped in and taken care of much of the problem. Ancestry is run by the Church of Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) as a commercial offshoot of their ginormous genealogical holdings. The site is strictly secular though and offers an amazing array of backend research services that turns one's offline family tree into a portal to dozens of historical record repositories. Just upload (or enter) what you know and the site begins searching census records, immigration manifests, military archives -- and the best of all, other people's trees that link up with yours back in the mists of time. Depending on where you're from you can flesh out your family rather easily. Just a few nights ago I actually got bored after taking my mom's mom's line back so far through the UK that my line proceeded through a reverse Norman invasion back to France in the 11th century. Goodness knows how far back the recorded lineage goes.
Perhaps the most entertaining feature of Ancestry.com is the “Find Famous Relatives” function, six-degrees of separation on steroids. Basically if you have a pretty fleshed-out tree (and especially if any branches of it stretch back through the UK), Ancestry returns a bewildering collection of well-known relatives. For instance, I am the seventh cousin twice removed from William Faulker. This means ol' Will and I share the same great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparent, though this person is two generations off from me. (Twice removed is what you are to the first cousins of your grandparents.) Not exactly thrilling. Ah, but there is thrill. I am the twelfth direct cousin of Werner Von Braun. This means we share the same great-grandmother12. Let's set aside that Herr Von Braun developed the V2 rocket for the Nazis and instead focus on his role as the father of the American space program, OK?
Even before I found Ancestry.com the web has been an inadvertent boon to family-finding. All you really have to do is get your name indexed by Google and it is off to the races. In the last six years I've been contacted by dozens of people with similar surnames or lineages who think they might be family. There's Roberto di Tolve, a citizen and resident of Holland who was born in Barile, Italy and who is now a close family friend. Roberto travelled to Barile with my family and I in 2003. He'll be back with us this July. There's Stephanie Saville of the Paternoster line who traces her line to the famous winemakers of Barile. Most recently there's Mike Botte who lives in NY and who grew up in Barile. (My great-grandmother is a Botte.) This may be the closest to true relation that's been established simply from an e-mail. Mike's cousin is the current mayor of Barile, who I will meet in July; so we'll know soon. Much more on Mike and his extraordinary brother John in a future post.
So, ok, you get it. Online genealogy can be fun. But I am already seeing the underside of it. For one, it really does make you think hard about what family is. Genealogy is really about bloodlines, not family in the broader sense which includes step-relatives, foster parents, and illegitimacy. It charts gene propagation not family structure. In this way it is conceptually similar to The Genographic Project.
Also, you do come across people who treat genealogy with the same trainspotting zeal as online discographers. For example, finding a limited pressing of a Rolling Stones LP with a typo in the liner notes makes it more valuable; finding a misspelling on an emigration document might be a useful clue -- but it might also be (and usually is) merely a massive pain in the ass. There's a kind of genealogy buff I've come across that doesn't really get this distinction.
Tags: barile, family, genealogy, ancestry
Posted at 8:14 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
December 22, 2005
Thrice blessed
Well, it looks like my youngest son was right when he assumed the West African stance that anticipates the coming of a new sibling. (Confused? Here's the story on that.)
That's right, we're expecting a new baby. Number three. Due May 27, a mere two days after our 10th wedding anniversary, causing us to continue to wonder just what in the hell we did with all our time prior to the arrival of the midget squad. I seem to recall thinking I was busy back then. Ha.
There's mixed opinion on the man-to-man parenting of two children versus the zone defense of three. I'm of the mind that it can't be worse than having two kids to run after. The transition from one mostly risk-averse toddler to a sibling who'd rather be juggling knives as he sets flame to a puddle of paint thinner was rough. But now that we've mastered the art of not allowing them to kill themselves, us, or others we're somewhat nonplussed by the challenge of a third. Can't be that bad. Right? Right?
The kids don't know yet. We can hardly announce an activity that is more than an hour in the future if we want any kind of peace from the is-it-time-yet questioning, so we're deferring until Mommy's rotundity is unavoidable. It'll be interesting to see the reaction. Happiness, befuddlement, anger, fraternal plotting? I'm certain there'll be plenty of post fodder from their commentary on the matter.
As an aside, I need better blog categories. Seems so cold to add this announcement to "Genealogy".
Posted at 10:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)
July 12, 2005
Macro-genealogy
A little while ago I posted the results of my participation in the Genographic Project, a comprehensive attempt to fill the holes in our knowledge of human migratory patterns around the globe based on genetic evidence. I just finished Spencer Wells's short, accessible introduction to this topic and, coincidentally, spent a 14-hour plane flight sitting next to the producer of a documentary who is using this data to help African-Americans determine their home areas in Africa in the absence of genealogical information. (Sitting next to him wasn't coincidence; he's with me on business. That we're both interested in population genetics is coincidence.) So I understand things a lot better now.
The first realization is how incomplete the picture is. The Genographic Project looks for markers (chromosomal mutations passed on from generation to generation) in the Y chromosome for men and in mitochondrial DNA for women. What this means is that my information only reflects my lineage via my father and his father and his father and so on (called the "patrilineal line"). At the very least I'm missing the story from my other three grandparents. Three of them are deceased, but luckily I have relatives who can be tested.
Here's what I know so far. My patrilineal line comes from the second migration of modern humans out of east Africa after what is known as The Great Leap Forward, an evolutionary moment where homo sapiens, through a truly lucky genetic mutation, acquired long-term memory, which allowed for the development of language (since thoughts could be strung together linearly), and thus to the ability to think more complexly. They made their way to Mesopotamia over the millennia and then 10,000 to 15,000 years ago my people -- my exact line descended from a single person -- were the instigators of what is is called the Neolithic Revolution, the birth of agriculture. My ancestors were the first farmers. They were the peoples who expanded into southern Europe and northern Africa, literally sowing the seeds of modern society.
The marker that denotes all this is called M172. It is relatively rare in Europe, occuring in only 20% of peoples in southern Italy; 10% in Spain. My ancestors were sedentary and Meditteranean-hugging. Somehow agriculture was transmitted via this line to the rest of Europe. (How this happened exactly is hotly debated.) If this isn't fascinating, I'm hard-pressed to describe to you something else that is.
But, again, this is only my Dad's male line. There's more to be learned. For instance, my paternal grandmother has always said there is Native American blood in her. This test will prove or disprove that right away.
Get ready, Grandma, cheek swab incoming!
Posted at 7:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
June 3, 2005
A long walk out of Africa
I'm just back from Canada (great trip, more soon) and my genographic data analysis is complete. The first finding is that I am, in fact, of the human species -- a data point which generates almost limitless disbelief among acquaintances. Second, it is interesting that, well, it connects my genography to my actual genealogical line (the family I actually know about as opposed to my descendants 60,000 years back) and plops it right where I thought it'd be: southern Italy. I didn't expect that kind of linkage.
My Y chromosome exhibits a genetic mutation known as M172 which makes me a member of haplogroup J2. M172 itself is related to a mutation called M168 which astonishingly can be traced to a single individual called "Eurasian Adam," the common ancestor of every non-African person living today. His descendants are the only line to survive after leaving Africa. But back to M172. This line heads out of east Africa to the Arabian peninsula, takes an incunabular pitstop in Mesopotamia, then treks west through Turkey, Albania, and into Italy. But what's that fork across north Africa? And all the other forklets? Well that's what this project hopes to figure out as it analyzes DNA from indigenous people around the world.
Oh boy. I got some reading to do.
See also: The Genographic Project
Posted at 8:28 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
April 13, 2005
The Genographic Project
OK, I'm pretty excited about this project. Today National Geographic and IBM announce a five-year partnership to map the patterns of dispersal and change of human DNA across the Earth. The goal is to develop an accurate picture of ancestral human migration patterns by analyzing genetic markers -- mutations transmitted from generation to generation -- in blood samples and cheek swabs from people all around the world. This is forensics on a global scale, macrogenealogy.
What makes this project unique, I think, is the opportunity for public participation. In addition to the indigenous populations that comprise a major part of the study, interested people anywhere can purchase a cheek swab kit and submit their cells for analysis. The process is completely anonymous. All your cells get is a barcode. The results can be interesting, sometimes dismantling preconceptions about one's family lineage going way back. (One Italian-American IBM executive who participated in an early test was shocked to learn that his family line extended into the mountains of Iran. How his family got there from Africa is one question that this project hopes to answer.) Once you submit your cells and the DNA is analyzed you can log in to the site and see the migration patterns, such as they are known at that point, of which your family is a part.
This will be controversial, no doubt. Society itself (not to mention the racist mind) depends on a firm belief in where people come from, who they are, and who they are not -- however dubiously tied to fact these beliefs may be. But better to know the real shape of the family tree than only to imagine it, no?
Info on the specifics of IBM's involvement is available. Some coverage here and elsewhere.
Posted at 6:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)
