Everyone wants to hear they were descended from, say, Napoleon or Catherine the Great-nobody wants to find out they were the great-great-great-great-great-grandchild of a medieval peasant or a scullery maid.Īnd history is full of obscured, tangled, and just plain ugly roots, a fact that is being discussed more widely now despite resistance from those who would rather ignore it or pretend it doesn’t matter. But, as we eagerly swab our cheeks and spit into tubes, we should remember that the problem with fetishizing your family history is that the more you look into it, the better the odds that you’ll find something that won’t impress people at dinner parties. The idea of ancestry, of finding one’s roots by digging up family histories, has become quite a trendy topic over the past few years.
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