White Roots: Looking for Great-Grandpa

Like Moliere's M. Jourdain, who in middle age found to his delight that he had been speaking prose all his life, a huge number of Americans are raptly if belatedly discovering that they are scions. Everyone--not just Anthony Dupuy Crustworthy IV--has ancestors and, with time, patience and luck, can trace a pedigree and track his progenitors back to Minsk or Marseille, the Isle of Wjght or at least Ellis Island.

Alex Haley, against stupendous odds, pursued his Roots two centuries back to darkest Gambia. For 130 million Americans glued to the eight-part Haley-Kinte TV chronicle in January, it was a transit through time and tears more gripping than Upstairs, Downstairs or any Stanley Kubrick fantasy. Says Michael Tepper, editor of Genealogical Publishing Co. in Baltimore: "Roots has shown that what seemed remote and mysterious is in fact knowable and within our grasp. It has awakened a smoldering awareness of facts we only thought were unknowable."

Pop Genealogy. The TV series impelled thousands of kin seekers to ferret through attics, trunks and old boxes of letters in pursuit of clues to their origins. At the Heritage Library in Glendale, Calif, which boasts an excellent genealogical collection, the number of visitors has increased by 75% in recent months. The New York Public Library, with one of the world's largest genealogical libraries, reported an increase in attendance in the month following Roots of 37% over February 1976. At the National Archives, the gray stone temple on Washington's Constitution Avenue, where Haley found his inspiration, mail inquiries about genealogical services have averaged 2,344 weekly since the broadcasts, v. 758 for the week before.

Americans' interest in stalking their forebears has in fact been increasing steadily over the past five years or so; it was greatly stimulated by the Bicentennial. According to expert estimates, amateur genealogy now ranks as the third favorite national hobby, after stamp and coin collecting. In fact, says Kenn Stryker-Rodda, associate editor of the venerable New York Genealogical and Biographical Society Record, family history "may now be outstripping philately and numismatics in popular interest." No small part of its allure is that ancestor hunting need not be expensive: the raw material and the rewards are in every family. Moreover, the new pop genealogy addresses itself to the lives, accomplishments, peccadilloes and personalities of flesh-and-blood progenitors, not merely the who-begat-whoms. Says Lynette Sherman, president of the Chicago Genealogical Society: "We no longer look for just the birth and death dates. We want to know something about the people. This new emphasis on the individual is going to give people identity, and that's what they want now."

Whatever their motivations (see TIME ESSAY), most amateurs who set out to nurture family trees these days do not seem to be on ego trips. Says Ralph W. Wood, a genealogist in Boston: "About three years ago, we began to hear from people who were not presuming descent from Alexander the Great or Governor Bradford but who do want to know where they come from." To meet the hunger for plain-folks genealogy, new courses are being offered at almost every educational level from grade school through college--and beyond. A five-day course for amateur genealogists at the National Archives was a sellout last month at $50 a head.

Along with thousands of local and specialized organizations, ranging from the Society of the Whiskey Rebellion of 1794, in Lancaster, Pa., to the Descendants of the Illegitimate Sons and Daughters of the Kings of Britain, in Lakeside, Conn., the search for roots has proved a bonanza for publishers and bookshops specializing in the subject. Indeed, the Joy of Genealogy bids fair to supplement cooking and sex as a major energy source for U.S. publishing mills. The biggest producer of books in the field. Genealogical Publishing Co. (nearly $1 million sales in 1976), has had a sharp increase in sales to colleges and school systems in recent months. A standard textbook published by the firm in 1973, The Researcher's Guide to American Genealogy by Val D. Greenwood, has gone into its fourth printing at $10.

Gilbert H. Doane's basic trace-'em-yourself manual. Searching for Your Ancestors (Bantam; $ 1.95), has sold 170,000 copies and is in its sixth printing. The first do-it-yourself book on tracing Jewish ancestors will be published in May: Dan Rottenberg's Finding Our Fathers (Random House; $12.95), with a valuable list of family names and sources. A useful volume for Anglo-Americans is David Iredale's Discovering Your Family Tree (Shire Publications; $1.65), a basic guide to the legal, ecclesiastical. business, family, county, school, military, tax and tithe records available in Britain. There are also books for tracing Scottish, Irish, German, Swedish, Norwegian and Dutch ancestors.

Any serious philoprogenitor should start with one of the pop primers: Doane's book, for example, or How to Trace Your Family Tree (Dolphin; $1.95), assembled by the American Genealogical Research Institute staff. Vast amounts of start-up information are available from Boston's Goodspeed's Book Shop, which stocks 5,000 volumes on individual families.

Apart from providing the mechanics of ancestralogy, the basic books forewarn of the pitfalls and frustrations in the path of the seeker. Names can be wildly misspelled in official records or else arbitrarily anglicized by immigration officials (Rosenzweig into Ross). Until the late 19th century, "cousin" could mean any blood relative except brother, sister, mother or father. "Brother" could designate a brother-in-law, a fellow member of the church or a good buddy. A 16-year-old virgin could be referred to as Mrs., short for Mistress, which was a recognition of social, not marital status, as was Mister, or Esq. (slightly below either was Goodman or Goodwife). Even in wills or parish registers, an old lady was often called Aunt.

Genealogists, archivists and historians consulted by TIME offer this additional advice to serious researchers:

> Genealogy begins at home. Start with yourself, the known, and work toward the unknown. Concentrate on your own immediate family on the father's side. (Genealogy is not necessarily a male-chauvinist pursuit, but families since Genesis have been officially recorded through the male line.) Talk to your oldest living relatives; if possible, tape-record their oral histories (and anecdotes and gossip). Write or interview any other known family members, share notations in family Bibles, business records, scrapbooks; exchange photo albums, diaries, memoirs, letters and official documents such as birth and death certificates, marriage licenses, wills, deeds, land titles, military records. Advertise your search in a genealogical magazine; the most widely circulated is the Genealogical Helper, Everton Publishers, Logan, Utah.

>Visit a public library's genealogy room and delve into its card file and book collection. Check newspaper files, church registers and courthouse records of towns where ancestors are known to have lived. Examine tombstones in old cemeteries, where poesy and precious data sometimes lurk.

>With names of ancestors, and towns, counties and states where they lived, visit the nearest of more than 20 genealogy libraries maintained by the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (Mormons). The branch can draw on resources of the central Mormon library in Salt Lake City, which has the world's largest repository of family genealogical information (on microfilm alone it has the equivalent of 4.3 million 300-page printed volumes). Its resources are open to non-Mormons and Mormons alike.*

>Visit one of the eleven regional branches of the National Archives (or its parent temple in Washington). This federal service has invaluable census records dating back to 1790, military and pension records from American wars beginning with the Revolutionary, passenger lists of immigrant ships, passport applications, naturalization records, land and bounty claims and much more. The Library of Congress (no branches) has a rich lode of 30,000 American and foreign genealogies. The D.A.R.'s Washington headquarters also has extensive records.

> Caveat: If you feel you need a professional researcher, write for a list of qualified practitioners to the Board for Certification of Genealogists, 1307 New Hampshire Avenue, NW, Washington, D.C. Average hourly fee: up to $10. For Anglo-Americans, Debrett's of London, the guru of British pedigree and form, opened a tracing bureau for the common man in February and received more than 1,000 inquiries its first month. For easy-to-trace families, Debrett's can deliver eight generations for roughly $200. In the U.S., there is a nourishing mail-order trade in expensive coats of arms (TIME, Jan. 27, 1975), but these are almost all bogus. Regardless of his surname, only the eldest son of the eldest son of families who actually bore arms is entitled to a shield. In Genealogist J. Charles Thompson's words: "You have no more business using another man's arms than you would have using his toothbrush."

All this can be an obsessive pursuit, one of Minoan complexity. Tracing a family back to 1600 will involve roughly 65,000 ancestors, or half a million if you go back to 1500. The pastime demands the nose of a scandalmonger, the connective skills of an archaeologist and the flat-footed persistence of a private eye. It also helps if one is a linguist, a lawyer, a historian, a geographer and the bearer of a free pass on the world's airlines. It can lead to unpleasant surprises, such as finding that an ancestor was deported from Britain or was killed in a brawl (like two of Jimmy Carter's forebears) or hanged. On the other hand, the search can turn up sturdy pioneers and genuine heroes. One resourceful family organization, with the unlikely name of the Southern Bean Association, has recorded the dustups and derring-do of the Scotch-American Bean clan since its arrival in Maryland in 1618. One old Bean helped stir the Mexican-Indian revolt against Spain; another ancestor, Russell, was the first white child born in Tennessee, in 1769. The Clan MacBean tartan was toted to the moon by Astronaut Alan Bean.

As a result of tracing their roots, observed Margaret Mead, "some feel less lonely, some feel more culpable, but all know more about who they are." Ultimately, the search can be a sociable and socially valuable undertaking--one that can reunite long-parted clans and alienated generations and fill their members with a tingling sense of identity and achievement.

*As part of their creed that the entire family is a unit in the future paradise, Mormons are required to trace their ancestors as far back as possible. Since the church was only founded in 1830, most of these forebears were not Mormons.

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