Let's give family trees the axe and get back to who we are today

Published on Thursday 30 March 2006 02:32

I AM sick of family-tree fever. I admit I sometimes fantasise that my ancestors stem from an exotic, wise and benevolent royal family from a far distant land. And, it is true, I often wonder about the lives of my real relatives from Russia and Poland. But despite these daydreams, I am tired of the contemporary obsession with our personal history.

Interest in family history has taken off, but I wish the roots would rot. The TV has recently been covered with self-important celebrities discovering their ancestry on the second series of BBC2's Who Do You Think You Are? The popularity of the series has led the BBC to commission a third and to move it to BBC1.

Watching Jeremy Paxman cry in series two, about the life of his great-great-grandmother, a charlady who lived in poverty in Glasgow, was great entertainment. But I would rather he shed tears because of his present than the long-distant past of someone he is related to.

The blossoming of interest in genealogy goes further than just watching the A-list discover the so-called "ordinary people" from their past. There are plenty of other TV programmes devoted to it, such as BBC4's Family Ties, where non-celebrities track down their past. BBC radio is even doing a roadshow of genealogy events. It seems like every newspaper has given, or is to give away, a guide to it.

MORE and more people are investigating their genealogy, and there are a greater number of services than ever to help them. This autumn sees the opening of the Scottish Family History Centre, which will create a "one-stop shop" for genealogy research in the middle of Edinburgh by bringing together services provided by the General Register Office for Scotland, National Archives of Scotland and the Court of the Lord Lyon. They expect to be very busy.

There are monthly magazines such as Family History and Tracing Ancestors; after a quick search in the newsagents, I counted six such titles on the shelves. There are many more on the web. Friends Reunited has launched a new site called Genes Reunited, through which you can trace ancestors.

I am sure it's a bit of fun for some. But for many, it seems that the interest in genealogy has become more than a harmless hobby. People talk about wanting to find their roots in order to know where they belong today. The website called 1837online.com, which assists budding researchers, explains: "A lot of them are trying to get a sense of identity, of where they come from."

The very title Who Do You Think You Are? - and the way the BBC programme is presented - also strongly suggests that our identities are forged in our blood and background rather than in what we do and how we live in the present. The Genes Reunited website captures this idea, too - that we are the sum of our genes, that personality and abilities are created by those who contributed to our gene pool.

LOOKING up the family becomes more than a historical exercise, more than simply drawing a tree of who-was-who to hang on the wall or to pass on to our children. It becomes a very personalised attempt to find out the "truth" of who we are, as if that is determined by accidents of history and birth rather than the actions we take and decisions we make in the present. This suggests a new superstition emerging: it's another way of saying that something is "written in the stars".

It's also a narcissistic way of approaching history - we find out what happened in the past so that it helps tell us who we are. What about simply finding out who other people were and how they lived? As it happens, the lives of those related to Paxman and others were fascinating and revealing in and of themselves, and not because their children's children became famous.

All of the people in the records office that I have come across (in the interests of research) are bright and talented, many are under 30 years old. Those I have spoken to express a desire "to find myself". They may improve their research skills and discover interesting facts in the files, but they won't discover who they are while looking backwards.

Ultimately, we are what we make ourselves - in the circumstances of the time, of course. Who we are is more contingent on now than then and on choices and actions we make; not those made by our family members before us. Luckily for us, it is only vegetables and flowers that are really dependent on their roots.