MAY 1, 2025 | OPINION | By Olivia Link (Staff writer)
My mom’s request for her 56th birthday was simple and rather cost-effective: she wanted a family tree dating back to her great-grandparents, along with anything I could find before they emigrated from Ireland. As I sat down to create an account with Ancestry.com, I quickly realized the enormity of the task before me – not only do most Irish Catholic women, including my mother, have the name Mary, but there was just so much information to sort through. I was a small fish in the gargantuan ocean of the genealogy industry, just one speck among the 35 million people who have shared DNA with it. The lion’s share of participants in the genealogy project comes from the United States – but why?
America prides itself on being a nation of immigrants, a bona fide ‘melting pot’ of cultures and identities. And yet, many feel lost, unmoored and separated from any meaningful history. The obsession with identity in our modern, individualist world has led millions of Americans to search for the past to make their present seem significant. Enter genealogy, the one-stop shop to cure all our existential woes.
Genealogy is no longer simply the domain of the elite – technological innovation and the emergence of a for-profit industry have put the tools of discovery into the hands of millions of – mostly white – middle-class Americans. While this technology has also undoubtedly proved useful in locating genetic medical conditions, as well as tracing family origins for Black, Jewish and Indigenous communities whose histories have been erased by violence, I argue that its meaning for white Americans may be indicative of a larger sense of alienation.
White Americans, unlike our European counterparts, lack a true sense of cultural identity. What do we have besides hamburgers, our obsession with global hegemony and a two-car garage? Americans define ourselves by how we consume and what we own. This is partially a natural outgrowth of the unfettered, hyper-individualistic capitalism we know so well, but it also stems from our lack of a unifying national history.
Documenting genealogy in the United States has its roots in the Mormon church, which established a genealogical society in 1894 that continues to operate today. The two founders of Ancestry, one of the leaders of the genealogy movement, were graduates of Brigham Young University. Over time, family mapping has become a multi-billion-dollar industry, with the advent of genetic testing only increasing profit potential. In 2018, for instance, 23andMe secured a $300 million deal with the major pharmaceutical company GlaxoSmithKline. Millions of Americans have sent DNA to these companies, which then sell it to universities and beauty brands – police departments have even used it to solve crimes. While the sale and availability of one’s genetic information can serve noble goals at times, the privacy implications are certainly worrisome.
Given the messy track record of genetic testing companies, why do Americans continue to share their most private information? The conflation of ancestry and identity plays a powerful role in this story, especially at a moment where identity has become a valuable commodity. People yearn for community and belonging, to feel like they are part of something bigger than themselves. Although many white Americans want to identify with another culture, that was not the case for their immigrant ancestors, the majority of whom assimilated as quickly as possible. Even immigrants who resisted integration have seen their cultures and traditions lost over time. This absence of ethnic heritage may also be one of the reasons that race is such a primary force in American consciousness. If our ancestors assimilated, abandoning native tongues and foreign dishes, they left us nothing communal to inherit other than the whiteness they established in the process.
So, does America have a sense of identity? Perhaps the recent popularity of genealogy reflects a broader societal reckoning, an absence of contemporary buy-in to the American mythos. How many of us actually feel strong national pride when we think about the Founding Fathers, many of whom owned slaves? How many of us still believe that the U.S. is a benevolent international force after the conflicts in Vietnam or Libya? America lacks what all European states have: albeit to varying degrees – a strong, unifying history. There is no single religious authority, and we didn’t even have a national language until Trump’s second term. The incredible size and regional diversity of the U.S. do not help either, nor does our relative youth: the United States as we know it has only existed for a handful of centuries, compared to the millennia of many European states. This is not to say that our nation is hopeless or fundamentally vapid. There is a great deal of powerful history that we can share and be proud of, and there have always been people who challenge the status quo in revolutionary ways – Nat Turner, Dolores Huerta, Malcolm X – they just happen to be less a staple of American history than a byproduct of its antagonisms. There are strategies for community building that go beyond shared identity, too. So the next time you find yourself swabbing your cheek or combing through Census reports, consider an alternative that builds community and looks toward the future rather than the past.