Roots, Ancestors, DNA: What are we looking for?
DNA tests, genealogical databases, the Dutch TV show Spoorloos, roots travels, family constellations, the search for biological ancestors: a (marketed) mass interest in ancestry and lineage has emerged in western worlds.
“In all of us, there is a hunger, bone-marrow deep, to know our heritage—to know who we are and where we have come from. Without this enriching knowledge, there is a hollow yearning.”
– Alex Haley
Since Alex Haley’s influential 1976 novel Roots, America has seen the rise of a genealogical industry. Western Europe would later start to pick up on the frenzy, with TV shows such as the Dutch Spoorloos, and the BBC’s Who do you think you are?, and particularly with the booming of DNA tests in the 21st century. Simultaneously, the value of ancestors and biological lineage has been accentuated from a different perspective. Stimulated by critical black studies, indigenous studies, and adoption studies, these voices bring to the fore the trauma and impact of forcefully broken (biological) family ties under colonialism, slavery, and international adoption.
Biological descent, lineage, and family trees are quite ambiguous issues. They also carry connotations of biological determinism, racism, and patriarchy. How can racial notions of biological descendance or nationalist belonging, and patriarchal foundations of lineage be critically distinguished from the longing for reparation after separations from ancestors, family, or parents? And, in the case of LHBTQI histories, how have symbolic ancestors done the work of rooting identities in the past in the absence of biological lineage? In sum: What kind of relationships with the past are sought for, and which ones are neglected or excluded?
Speakers
Francesca Morgan teaches U.S. history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Her publications include her 2021 book on American genealogy’s political dimensions, entitled A Nation of Descendants, and her earlier monograph on hereditary organizations, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (2005).
Chiara Candaele is a postdoctoral researcher at NL-Lab, KNAW. She specializes in studying the historical intersections of children and colonialism. She wrote a Ph.D. dissertation on the history of transnational adoption in postcolonial Belgium, and is currently conducting research on institutional childcare in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia (1800-1980).
Ayşenur Korkmaz received her Ph.D. at the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the afterlives of the Armenian genocide, touching upon mass violence, genealogy, and heritage studies. Korkmaz currently works at the Meertens Institute on an ERC-funded project, where she focuses on Turkey’s immersive heritage spaces and the political imaginaries of neo-Ottomanism.
Marijke Huisman is assistant professor of Public History in the Department of History at Utrecht University, interested in emancipatory uses of the past. She recently published Queer geschiedenis van Nederland. De strijd om een eigen verleden (2026). (A Queer History of the Netherlands. The Struggle around a History of Themselves).
Geertje Mak (moderator) is Professor of Gender History and Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, NL-Lab and KNAW.
