Tree-Hugger: An (Online) Genealogy of Morals

How can I possibly be related to you?

Recently I was shocked to learn that, not only theologians, but scientists now assert that every last human being on the planet—white and black, Christian and Muslim, Cardinal fan and Cub fan alike—are all—yes, ALL!—descended from a single female, dubbed “Mitochondrial Eve” by geneticists, and a single male, “Y-chromosome Adam.”  I stumbled upon this astonishing scientific fact in a Jeremy Rifkin talk animated by the Royal Society for the Arts.  Rifkin’s idea is that, since we are all related, it may be possible for all of humanity to identify as one large family. I’m skeptical.

And before you run off half-cocked to start spreading the “good news” that the Bible had it right all along, allow me to burst your bubble: scientists believe that the genetic “Eve” lived about 200 thousand years ago whereas “Adam” lived only 60 thousand years ago.  How does this happen?  I’m not exactly sure, but Adam must have been quite the Casanova in a small, yet uniquely successful population entirely descended from Eve.  Frankly, I find a large degree of peace in that 150 thousand year gap, for it avoids the truly frightening question posed by literal Creationism: where did Seth’s wife come from?  For there is only one answer to THAT question: she would have had to have come from the same place that Seth, Cain, and Able came from. A sister. Or, even worse: Seth procreated with Eve herself. Ug. Ew. Yikes!

"Calvin Klein! Isn't he a dreamboat?"

And of course incest is the fundamental taboo upon which civilization depends.  Don’t believe me? Just go ask Freud or Oedipus…or Marty McFly.  No, no, kids, the fundamental taboo is not murder. In fact, according to Freud the threat of capital punishment was first used to prevent—you guessed it—incest. We are just fine with killing certain people in certain situations, but the mere contemplation of mommy-son action is enough to make us wanna gouge our own eyes out or, dare I even mention, listen to Huey Lewis songs. Gag me! But don’t worry: the genetic Adam, his many partners, and their progeny were probably cousins…very distant cousins.  Whew! …though incest would certainly go a long way toward explaining the nightly news. [continued after the break: click "read more"]

And yet one can certainly empathize with the Creationists in one respect: their religious mystification is the product of a desire to know where we came from and why we are here.  And don’t we all want to know the answers to those questions? About a week back, my daughter and I were watching a program on the news that mentioned the existence of DNA.  “Daddy, what’s DNA?” Now, that’s difficult to explain to a 4-year-old. Before I knew it, I was Googling pictures of babies, fetuses, zygotes and eggs, constructing a narrative back toward her origins. “You see, you are half mommy and half daddy. Get it?” “But daddy, how did your DNA get in mommy’s belly?” Given my current relationship (or lack thereof) with her mother, that is a question I ask myself from time to time, but I’m just not going there with baby girl.  I think I changed the subject to something with lots of sugar in it.

That said, I get what motivates Creationists and children the world over, for I’ve sought such answers for as far back as I can recall—which brings me to my grandfather, a man I hardly knew until I was 7 or 8.  You see, Ye Olde Man liked to stare into bottles, and my parents limited my exposure to him until he sobered up in the early 80s.  From then on all was hunky dory as far as I knew, and, as a benefit of the new normalcy, we held weekly family dinners at my grandparent’s house.  To celebrate his reformation, one of my aunts bought the Olde a music box that played “Show Me the Way to Go Home.” As a sort of new family ritual, someone would wind up that music box after dinner and, to show his good humor about the whole business, the Olde would swirl his ice tea in a rocks glass and sing along in an affected slur.  You see, it was all hunky dory.  At least it seemed that way until I was about ten….

That’s when I first became curious about my own genealogy.  I drew out a tree on a yellow legal pad with three generations on it.  That’s all I knew.  And the strange thing is that that is all most adults know. I mean, maybe people know something about their great-grandparents, but rarely can anybody rattle off the name of their great-great-grandparents.  It’s pretty odd if you think about it. Wouldn’t grandparents tell their grandchildren about their grandparents?  So, I took the next logical step: I decided ask my grandparents about their parents and grandparents at our next get-together.

My grandmother told me that her father was Harry Goldberg and her mother was Rose Pravda; both forenames were Anglicized versions of Yiddish names, Ruchel in my great-grandmother’s case.  I later learned that Harry came over on a ship from Gdansk to avoid conscription into the Russian army during World War I. Ok, cool. I filled in that branch on my legal pad and turned to my grandfather. 

At first he just acted like he hadn’t heard me, but I just kept on pestering him. His parents were Orville Proctor and Thelma Martin.  Ok. Down on the legal pad.

Now they weren’t immigrants, so who were their parents?  My grandfather pursed his lips for a moment...  All of a sudden, he pounded his open hand on the table and looked at me squarely: “My dad’s parents were Richard and Pearl.”  Before I could even begin ask him about his mother’s family, he had pushed back his chair and gone out into the garage for a smoke. Hmm. I decided not to ask my maternal grandparents about any of this nonsense…

About two years ago, I saw an ad on TV and began tooling about Ancestry.com.  I think I got some sort of free trial, so I figured what the hay? At the very least I wouldn’t anger or upset anyone by compelling them into their past.  Initially, I didn’t get very far.  I’d type in a name and the search records didn’t seem to have a thing to do with anyone in my family. But I soon realized that the census takers weren’t all that picky about how they spelled my ancestors’ names; so on my mother’s side, in addition to Lockner, I tried Lochner and Lakhner and even Lakner. Eventually I had a break in the case, a census record with names of not only my great-grandparents but all of my grandfather’s siblings.  You see, census records come in quite handy to the American genealogist, a convenience provided for in our Constitution in fact.  But all too often the trail grows cold for the amateur genealogist in any attempt to trace roots back to the Old World.  In the case of my German-Irish mother’s family, I struggled to get further back than my great-great grandparents.  My great-great-grandmother Margaret O’Grady (nee Darcy) followed her daughters over at the turn of the century, shortly after her husband John died in Ireland.  My great-great-grandparents Bertram and Adeline Rudolph came over from Germany separately, meeting here in St. Louis shortly after the Civil War.  They had three sons who all died before attaining manhood.  Death is a common theme in genealogical research.  Life is hard now, but in the old days life was thoroughly fraught with tragedy….

Daniel Darius VanLeuvan

I did have one grand success on my mother’s side as my great-great-grandfather Daniel VanLeuven had the great fortune to marry into the family of a prominent Mormon.  It turns out Mormons are crazy for genealogy. You see, in addition to all that insanity about magic underwear and the ill effects of caffeine, They believe that They can baptize the dead and make more Mormons. To this end, They’re amassing a databank called the “Millennium File” through which They hope to account for every human being that has ever lived. I’ve even heard that Ancestry is a grand plot on the part of the LDS to turn our deceased ancestors Mormon.  Hmm, do They charge extra for that? 

At any rate, an embarrassing number of my ancestors actually chose the Mormon religion.  So, the Millenium File contains records of the VanLeuven clan going way back, to Ontario in the early 19^th century, to New York in the 18^th century, and from Holland to New Amsterdam in the 17^th century.  I’m not sure how much of that I buy, but I like to imagine Pierterse Van Leuven sailing over from Holland around the same time that Milton was composing Paradise Lost….

My 4x-great-grandfather's headstone.

On my father’s side I had pretty much the same experience; I’d get back 4 or 5 or 6 generations to the person who came over from the Old World and lose the trail. In typical male fashion, I exhibited some determination on the patrilineal branch and learned more than I had expected.  I learned that my great-grandfather Richard Proctor abandoned his wife and children.  He turns up some years later in the state penitentiary down in Arkansas, and that’s the last we hear of old Dick Proctor. Maybe he died in prison. His father, Lafayette William Proctor, owned a colorful moniker and a mass of farmland in southern Illinois.  And his father, Harris JW Proctor, died while serving in Grant’s Army of the Tennessee at the battle of Shiloh on 6 April 1862.  In fact, Harris is buried in the national park at Shiloh alongside dozens of other members of the 46^th Ohio Infantry; I even found a picture of his tombstone on the park’s website. Amazing.

Yet, the details surrounding my great-great-great-great-grandfather’s death are not the most significant discovery that I made in all of my genealogical research.  You see, my great-grandmother Thelma Proctor (nee Martin) died on 6 Jun 1937 during the 8^th year of the Great Depression.  Hard times. My grandfather was only six when his mother died.  He started smoking by the time he was seven and ultimately died of a smoking related illness.  He must have run about the streets during the days, dirty, shoeless, and hungry. He was an intelligent if unimaginative man. So, who answered his big questions? Who explained things to him? He would have had little to do but skip school and cultivate bitterness. I guess that has something with why he liked to stare into bottles. Who knows?  It’s all small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.

For, in the end, how do I get my head around two amazing facts?  On the one hand, I am the result of a woefully incomplete family tree already containing over one-thousand people.  Each had to fight for survival in a world of disease and poverty. Each had to fall in love at with a particular person. I mean, I could write a whole piece on the unlikelihood of my parents even dating much less having me. And each ancestral couple had to conceive at a precise moment in order to get one specific egg and one specific sperm to produce another of my ancestors, who also had to live and fight and strive and love.  This astronomically unlikely occurrence had to recur for tens of thousands of years just for me to sit here writing this piece.

And, yet, in an overpopulated globe of 7 billion people of different races and creeds and cultures, masses of souls who feel the strangeness, not only of the foreign Other, but of their own neighbors, all those that fight wars and hate each other and remain indifferent to the wealth of suffering all around us—we are all descended from two people.  But it doesn’t stop there: in addition, every human that has ever lived throughout recorded history is, as a matter of scientific fact, descended from those two people.  The starving child in a South American slum, the proletarian in North Korea, the Wall Street billionaire, the President of the United States, Shakespeare, Joe McCarthy, Lou Gehrig, Julius Caesar, me, you…everyone is the direct descendant of Mitochondrial Eve and Y-Chromosome Adam.  It’s a scientific fact. And I can tell you that without renewing my Ancestry membership.

And yet I cannot believe that we will begin to conceive of each of our fellow beings as our own family. And I cannot begin to explain the nightly news….