Pondering the Task of Pondering Your Origins

03 May, 2026

I’ve written before about what I’ll call my ambivalence about genealogical research—or rather, how it often gets presented in the US American context, as a tool of instant and heartening connection to a past and its actors, of self-revelation, of good feeling all around. Ancestry.com commercials are necessarily more sanguine and thin on context than Finding Your Roots (which I admit I often binge). For the most part, though, genealogy in a diverse and polarized country that’s long touted itself as being free from the shackles of the past, free to move fast and break things, can’t but boil down to a sentimental exercise. Unless you’re Ben Affleck, the sense is that you can’t be blamed for where you came from; no guilt attaches to you via your lineage, because the individual is all, and you didn’t make the decisions for or have any influence over long-dead individuals.¹

The topic’s come up again thanks to Thomas Bernhard’s memoir, Gathering Evidence. Consigned as a young man to sanatorium treatment for lung disease, Bernhard settled on a tree stump and got down to trying to figure out his life, his reticent family and its mysteries, the mess of what he’d experienced as a generally cruel world. “I pondered my origins,” he says, “asking myself whether I really ought to be interested in knowing where I came from, whether or not I should risk unearthing the facts, whether or not I had the courage to submit myself to a full investigation.”² Having never known more than a few facts about his father, or why no one would even say anything about him; not having understood his family’s mixture of abuse and love, or the brutality of the education to which they submitted him; having taken little more from childhood experience, which included World War II, than evidence of human cant and savagery; really getting to the bottom of everything that had produced him—having to immerse himself once again in those ordeals—was no lighthearted task. It was absolutely not an exercise guided by a kindly expert who would at the end of it all hand you a display-worthy book containing reassuring familial histories and clear lines connecting you to yesteryear.

Add to Bernhard’s hesitation his firsthand and prolonged witness of the fact that even if you didn’t identify with, or even really know much about, your heritage, the outside world would make and act upon judgments about it for you. There was the war, of course, and the knowledge, whenever it surfaced, about what the Nazis had decided about peoples’ origins. There were his school days, in which students from good families were treated entirely differently from everyone else. And there was the knowledge as a resident of Salzburg that everyone who’d come from, even if they’d made their way out of, the Scherzhauserfeld Project, was forever to be treated by the rest of the town as untouchables, inherent criminals, unworthy of anything more than the bare minimum, if even that. In other words, all the same sorts of prejudices that will probably always take on any number of forms. In the US, think redlining or overpoliced neighborhoods or the ability to get a good education, or a loan or affordable car insurance or rent, based on your ZIP code. Think, most recently, of the new brownshirts known as ICE, and whom they’ve been sent out to target. Whoever you think you are, finding out where you’ve come from, or who or what is at least partially responsible for your current existence, could prove terrifying in any number of ways, maybe most of all because you have only a limited amount of power to decide what that even means in the world’s eyes. And if you discover you’re one of the despised, how should you act thereafter? In solidarity? By trying to pass as someone else or escaping? If you uncover a history of atrocity perpetrated by your forebears, then what?

I’m not arguing that genealogical research is ridiculous (and holy hell, do I love Henry Louis Gates Jr., whether on his show or in his writing or even more, in his apparent assumption that being a scholar does not involve separating yourself from or looking down on hoi polloi). You’ve got to admit the value for adoptees in at least knowing where and to whom they were born—and even practically, how having information about biological kin might affect their own medical histories. And understanding where you came from might have an entirely different weight for a Western European than for a Black American whose ancestors were forcibly removed from their homes, only to have as much as possible about their identities erased upon arrival in the US. (Indeed, Finding Your Roots began as an effort to help people discover “what ethnic group they were from in Africa.”³) But here’s the thing: it’s no surprise that when US Americans, at least, are encouraged to get excited about genealogy, there seems to be little corresponding encouragement to consider in more than sentimental (maybe “empowering”) fashion what it could mean—emotionally, practically, in terms of present responsibility and affinity, and so much more—to come from a particular place or people or circumstance.

It could be that my beef is just with my own native country’s tendency to—instead of planting itself on a tree stump (or under the Buddha’s bodhi tree) and thinking, long and hard, and longer and harder for as long as it takes, about anything—stick to the surface and assure itself everything’s fine. If researching our families ends up shaking us out of some complacencies, then, I’m all for it. In that spirit, maybe we could make a Bernhard-inspired spin-off of Gates’s show—maybe Gates would even relish the chance to get into the real dirt and hurt of things—though I’d bet my last dollar PBS wouldn’t get anywhere near it.

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