Day 306: Finding My Roots?

On April 9, my favorite show, Finding Your Roots, featured three viewers who had mysteries in their families’ pasts that they’d been unable to solve. In each case, DNA evidence answered questions about who their real ancestors were — confirming longtime family speculation, solving mysteries, or revealing names they’d never heard before. I’d missed the episode when it aired, so we watched it tonight.

Photo by Jeremy Bishop on Unsplash

As I’ve found myself tracing the ancestry of my biography subject, Wilbur J. Carr, I’ve become fascinated with the use of genealogical research to tell stories about the U.S. legal system. The law has no personality, no identity of its own — the law is us. It’s our values, our hopes, our prejudices, written up in an ancient language and printed in heavy books. Understanding the law means understanding ourselves, and that means understanding our histories.

I plan to do some basic genealogical training this summer so that I can improve my use of those sources and communicate intelligently with the genealogists I’ll pester for help as I research Carr’s and others’ stories. Because I’m most interested in telling our country’s story, however, I doubt if I’ll ever take the time to learn my own.

I’ve dreamed of someday being a guest on Finding Your Roots. The show’s website says that the three guests on the April 9 episode were chosen out of a casting call that generated nine thousand entries. I don’t really like my chances on that kind of lottery, so I’m banking on my (much more realistic) backup strategy: writing books about American history so compelling, so insightful, so acclaimed, that Dr. Gates and the production staff of Finding Your Roots will veritably beg me to be a guest on the show, to find my own roots.

Hey, it could happen (or not — but at least I’ll have a whole lot of fun trying).