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| 4 out of 5 stars |
A.J. Jacobs has
received some strange emails over the years, but this note was perhaps
the strangest: “You don’t know me, but I’m your eighth cousin. And we
have over 80,000 relatives of yours in our database.”
That’s
enough family members to fill Madison Square Garden four times over. Who
are these people, A.J. wondered, and how do I find them? So began
Jacobs’s three-year adventure to help build the biggest family tree in
history.
Jacobs’s journey would take him to all seven continents.
He drank beer with a US president, found himself singing with the
Mormon Tabernacle Choir, and unearthed genetic links to Hollywood
actresses and real-life scoundrels. After all, we can choose our
friends, but not our family.
I would call this a book
about genealogy for people who aren’t really all that interested in the
subject. It is genealogy lite. Which is not to say that it isn’t a good
book or that I didn’t like it. I enjoyed it a great deal.
I’ve
been doing genealogy since I was a teenager and discovered our family
Bible, with my great-grandfather’s handwritten records of the family in
it. It’s huge & heavy and he bought it from someone in a California
train station for 25 cents back in the day. He was a lumberman and his
family lived in New Brunswick (and he got migraines—he’s who I blame my
headaches on!).
Maybe not the most exciting of stories, but you
find all kinds of interesting tales when you start investigating. I
haven’t made time for this pursuit for years, but reading this book has
encouraged me to get thinking about it again.
I had read in a
genealogy book that if you have European heritage, the very furthest
apart you can be related to others with similar ties is 10th cousin.
Jacobs’ research takes things a step farther: the farthest apart you can
be related to anyone on Earth is 70th cousins. Start singing Kumbaya,
folks, because we really do belong to the Family of Humankind.
The
strange thing is, we do have a bias for treating our family just a
little better than others—cutting them some slack when they do things
that we don’t understand, for example. What better way is there to
increase the kindness quotient in the world than to realize that we are
all relatives and all deserve that kind of treatment.
Pie in the sky, I know, but both the author & I wish that it could come true.
Read for the PopSugar reading challenge to fill the “Book tied to your ancestry” choice.
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| 2.5-2.75 stars out of 5 |
When the naked,
mutilated body of a man is found in a Notting Hill graveyard and the
police investigation led by Detective Chief Inspector Grant Foster and
his colleague Detective Superintendent Heather Jenkins yields few
results, a closer look at the corpse reveals that what looked at first
glance like superficial knife wounds on the victim's chest is actually a
string of carved letters and numbers, an index number referring to a
file in city archives containing birth and death certificates and
marriage licenses. Family historian Nigel Barnes is put on the case. As
one after another victim is found in various locations all over London,
each with a different mutilation but the same index number carved into
their skin, Barnes and the police work frantically to figure out how the
corresponding files are connected. With no clues to be found in the
present, Barnes must now search the archives of the past to solve the
mystery behind a string of 100-year-old murders. Only then will it be
possible to stop the present series of gruesome killings, but will they
be able to do so before the killer ensnares his next victim? Barnes,
Foster, and Jenkins enter a race against time and before the end of the
investigation, one of them will get much too close for comfort.
It’s pretty difficult to
make genealogy and genealogists seem sexy. Records research is never
going to be as riveting as blood splatter analysis or DNA, but Waddell
does his best. I liked the link between the Victorian murders and those
of the present day. As someone who has spent some time in family history
centres and records offices, I could recognize many of the “types” who
peopled these places. There’s always at least one creepy dude like Nigel
Barnes’ nemesis.
Unfortunately it is cliché ridden (the handsome
researcher with something troubling in his past, the policewoman with a
soft heart, the stuck-in-a-rut DCI in charge). There’s potential here,
but if you aren’t a fan of research or records management, this may not
be the book that you’re looking for.
Not bad, but not wonderful either.
