The Mythical Quest for Our Ancestors is Big Business

Historia Actua Online, Vol. 12, Issue. 10, 2005

Research evidence shows the Internet has had a revolutionary impact on our society and the way we live everyday. Consequently, as the Internet influences the many aspects of everyday lives, hobbyist interests in areas such as history have also been enhanced and changed by the Internet as a social technology. One hobby, genealogy, has risen above all to be one of the most popular online, providing an opportunity to understand the use of the Internet within a broader context. As a result, the author has commenced a PhD research program with Curtin University of Technology, Australia, to examine how genealogists use the Internet, and to investigate the consequences of the development of genealogy as a significant Internet-based activity. The purposed of this article, therefore, is to present the research notes of the study.

Genealogy, 2018

Over the past decade, the DNA ancestry-testing industry—based largely in the United States—has experienced a huge upsurge in popularity, thanks partly to rapidly developing technologies and the falling prices of products. Meanwhile, the notion of " genetic genealogy " has been strongly endorsed by popular television documentary shows in the US, particularly vis-à-vis African-American roots-seekers—for whom these products are offered as a means to discover one's ancestral " ethnic " origins, thereby " reversing the Middle Passage. " Yet personalized DNA ancestry tests have not had the same reception among people of African descent in other societies that were historically affected by slavery. This paper outlines and contextualizes these divergent responses by examining and comparing the cultural and political meanings that are attached to notions of origin, as well as the way that Blackness has been defined and articulated, in three different settings: the United States, France and Brazil.

Heritage, Culture and Identity

humanities.mcmaster.ca

Sociology, 2011

Drawing on the 2008 Mass Observation Directive ‘Doing Family Research’, this article explores the role of genealogy in personal lives from the perspective of genealogists and non-genealogists in the UK. Analysing the ends to which genealogy is put, it finds that genealogy is a key kinship practice, mapping connectedness, offering a resource for identity-work, and allowing belonging in time. Engaging with anthropological work on kinship, relatedness and remembrance and with recent sociological work on identity and affinity, this article explores how family history as a creative and imaginative memory and kinship practice is simultaneously used to map affinities and connectedness, enact relatedness, and produce self-identity. It argues that examining the role of genealogy and the genealogical imaginary reveals that conventional as well as non-conventional kinship produces partial and insecure identities. This compels everyday personal engagement with the meaning and legacy of inheritance for collective and individual identification and identity.

Genetic genealogy is a complex discipline that employs a variety of evidence to create a truthful model about the ancestry of individuals and lineages by discovering close or distant genetic matches (CGM and DGM) (“cousins”) and producing models of ancient origin (“ethnicity”) based on individual data. The role of genetic data varies, as does the way it has been used at different levels of research. Close and distant genetic matches (CGM & DGM) have been discovered based on comparing the quantity and character of matching centimorgans. While close relatives recognized as such by the high percentage of shared centimorgans can be cousins / uncles / aunts, distant genetic matches described as 4 th - 8 th “cousins” are defined based on small quantity of centimorgans matches, a scenario which may have different explanations. To determine ancient origin (“ethnicity”), a researcher must compare thousands of data to locate the origins of the tested individuals in numerous regions throughout the world. The methodology is still not well developed and explained, so this work analyzes genetic origin as a scientific problem instead. The foundation of the genetic origin search incorporates results from individual DNA testing, most popular of which are ancestry.com [1], 23 & Me [2], Family Tree DNA & Helix [3,4]. The theoretical background is analyzed in scientific literature [5-10] or in numerous websites of social media [10]

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2019

In the past half century, the Indigenous Australian population has grown at a far faster rate than can be explained by births alone, and has come to include more western-educated people living in the south-east of the country. Demographers attribute much of this growth to people identifying as Indigenous later in life. Social research has examined the phenomenon of “New Identifiers” in the United States and Canada, where similar shifts in indigenous populations have been observed. This paper is the first to examine the issue in an Australian context. We analyse 33 interviews with people who have come to believe they have Indigenous Australian ancestry later in life, and identify factors that encourage members of this group to subsequently identify as Indigenous, or discourage them from doing so.

Ethnic and Racial Studies, 2018

In the past half century, the Indigenous Australian population has grown at a far faster rate than can be explained by births alone, and has come to include more western-educated people living in the south-east of the country. Demographers attribute much of this growth to people identifying as Indigenous later in life. Social research has examined the phenomenon of “New Identifiers” in the United States and Canada, where similar shifts in indigenous populations have been observed. This paper is the first to examine the issue in an Australian context. We analyse 33 interviews with people who have come to believe they have Indigenous Australian ancestry later in life, and identify factors that encourage members of this group to subsequently identify as Indigenous, or discourage them from doing so.

2012

Doctor of Philosophy, 2012 Dissertation Directed By: Professor Sheila Jelen Department of English As Jewish identities become more hybridized in what Manuel Castells calls a "network society," genealogical research intensifies the questioning of how Jews identify and who identifies as Jewish. Jewish identities based on relation, location, and devastation develop out of genealogical research, especially when networks such as the internet increase access to information and communities of other researchers. Mining the internet for genealogical information and searching for heritage only add to the possibilities of Jewish identity, revealing Jewish kin, connections to a particular place, or the tragedy of the Holocaust--evidence of the ways in which the World Wide Web changes Jewish identity formation. The internet is a virtual gathering place for the commemoration and study of Jewish life and culture, even as its use challenges conventional modes of Jewish community and identity formation. Through its treatment of the internet and Jewish identity, this dissertation explores new media and their cultural impact, arguing that new media enable penetrable and osmotic identities instead of reifying delimited parameters. Using Marianne Hirsch’s "postmemory," Hayden White’s "emplotment," Vivian M. Patraka’s "goneness," and Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett’s "hereness" as critical lenses through which to view Jewish genealogical Web sites, I show how the narratives on Jewish genealogical research Web sites, cyber-shtetls, and personal genealogy Web sites and blogs reveal constructions of Jewish identity that have never before been articulated as viable options for forming Jewish communities. Jewish communities of relation, location, and devastation may resemble other Jewish communities, but they are unique in that they are virtual--their homes are online. The narratives found on each genre of Web site are functions of postmemory, in that they are the results of family lore, emplotted in order to tell coherent family histories. The "hereness" of postmemory confronts the "goneness" of much of the lives and times that compose Jewish culture, allowing for the creativity that emplotment requires. When Jewish genealogists search for their heritage online, they encounter communities of other genealogists who are just as eagerly emplotting their own genealogical narratives.