Author Francesca Morgan traces Americans’ fascination with tracking family lineage through three centuries, and examines how specific groups throughout history grappled with finding and recording their forebears, focusing on Anglo-American, Mormon, African American, Jewish, and Native American people. She explores how genealogy has always mattered in the United States, whether for taking stock of kin when organizing a family reunion or drawing on membership—by blood or other means—to claim rights to land, inheritances, and more. And since the advent of DNA kits that purportedly trace genealogical relations through genetics, millions of people have used them to learn about their medical histories, biological parentage, and ethnic background.
