What Role Did Genealogy Play in the Founding of America?

Genealogy in early America functioned as a vital legal and political infrastructure rather than a simple personal hobby. While Revolutionary leaders publicly rejected inherited political power, they still relied heavily on family trees to dictate property rights, establish social credit, and enforce the laws of coverture and slavery. From George Washington tracking inheritances on a two-sided chart to everyday citizens recording lineages in almanac margins and on stitch samplers, ancestry acted as an inescapable cultural currency. In this interview, historian Karin Wulf explores how tracing these deeply embedded family connections reshapes our understanding of the nation’s founding.

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The book cover of "Lineage" by Karin Wulf, featuring a stitchwork of several 18th-century artifacts such as a family tree and tombstone. — Karin Wulf explores the integral role of family history in “Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America.”

Lineage as Political and Legal Infrastructure

— Early American laws are essential to understanding why family history records were kept and how they were utilized.

How has genealogy shaped the structural history of the United States?

Thanks so much for having me on, and for asking these great questions! So many of the issues I tackle in Lineage stem from the ways genealogy is pigeonholed, even when we know better! We still think of genealogy as something individuals do out of curiosity or private interests (including religious ones) rather than as a systemic effort that governments and other institutions have long invested in.

But genealogy—recording, tracing, and making use of ancestry—has been a central feature of the United States since the founding.

It was inherited from colonial practices

In British American law, for example, a core feature of property was and is inheritance, and it isn’t only individuals who determine who inherits. Many people then and many people now die without wills, and then the government gets to work to determine the lawful heirs of the deceased.

There are plenty of other contexts in which knowing who is related to whom was and is expected. Officials kept vital records, for example, often for free people by their religious communities or local governments and for enslaved people by enslavers and, in specific situations, by courts, knowing that this was essential information.

Family history is “baked” into daily life

None of that changed when the United States became a nation! So, while there was debate before the American Revolution—and certainly during and after—about how and whether government should be run by a monarch on the basis of heredity, that essential infrastructure of genealogy remained. If anything, it has become more robust over time with enhanced data collection.

It does seem to us to fly in the face of how we characterize Americans and independent individuals. That’s part of the point of my book: to show that interconnection has been baked in, not just to daily life but also the structures that govern our lives.

How did prominent figures like John and Abigail Adams reconcile their interest in lineage with a revolutionary movement that championed merit over birthright?

They’re a wonderful case because each of them was quite interested in their family history, both the generations of their family in New England, and their ancestors and living kin in England. And of course, John and Abigail Adams’s son, John Quincy Adams, was the first child of a president to be president himself.

People have written about the anxiety surrounding legacy politicians. One of the many appeals of George Washington was that he had no biological children to inherit his political position and status.

I’m not sure the Adamses thought they had to “reconcile” the language of the revolution with the deeper structures of lineage.

Every single “founder” was interested in family history in one way or another. Benjamin Franklin’s extraordinary Autobiography of the quintessential striving American starts with his family history research trip to England with his son!

Learn more about how the “founders” used genealogy in this episode of the Ben Franklin’s Word podcast with Liz Covart and Karin Wulf.

They all participated in the system of inherited wealth, and they were all interested in other people’s families as a proxy—if not always a determinant—of a person’s situation.

But founders like the Adamses absolutely supported the revolution’s basic premise, which rejected heredity as the prerequisite for political authority.

And they, like others, expressed some ambivalence about genealogical enthusiasm. Thomas Jefferson had some classically Jeffersonian things to say about heraldry, for example. Mostly, though, they went right on doing their genealogical things.

Who was William Blackstone?

William Blackstone was the first law professor at Oxford, and he initially wrote instruction manuals (of sorts) for his students. His magnum opus, Commentaries on the Laws of England, is cited even in the U.S. Supreme Court fairly recently.

Mostly, people have focused on the text of what he says about the common law (that is, statutes not passed by legislatures). But he created a massive genealogy as a teaching tool and wrote extensively about a particular family to illustrate it. It was used all over the colonies and the new nation.

How did early American law address inheritance?

The laws across British America were very specific about family relationships when it came to inheritance. Not every colony (and then state) was exactly the same, but the basic idea was that when men and women married, the husband became the head of their new household, and the wife became a kind of legal non-entity.

She couldn’t make contracts in her own name, for example, or own property (with some exceptions). This was the law of coverture. When a man died, his widow would inherit some of his property to use during her lifetime. Without a will, the government would figure out how to distribute property.

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The Paradox of Power: Slavery and Status

— Genealogical records could trap someone in slavery—or provide a legal means for their escape.

How did lineage represent a form of cultural currency in early America?

Sometimes we think about genealogy as a fact (someone’s genealogy) or a practice (someone does genealogy), but it was also a kind of cultural currency. Discussing family connections was a way that people could assess someone’s background and situation.

It wasn’t a perfect way of doing a credit check, but in an economy that mostly ran on book debt—debt and credit exchanged among people for large and small amounts—it was an important one. It’s also why people sometimes tried to suggest they had a family connection, even if they didn’t!

How was lineage used as a “legal weapon” to settle (or stir up) territorial battles in Early America?

It’s always remarkable to come across, for example, an extensive family tree documenting an Indigenous family in the court records. Among African, European, and Indigenous people in early America, there were different ways of thinking about lineage.

But British American-style lineage was written into the law. So, part of what we see in the court materials is that people had to make their own family structures legible to that law. Which could mean tracing a father’s line in the case of property, or a mother’s line in the case of a dispute about freedom status.

What made early American laws unique in their approach to the children of female slaves?

Although so much was the same in British and British American law, one major difference was the law that enabled maternal heritable slavery. Throughout the colonies and then the United States, enslaved women knew that their babies would be enslaved, too.

Because a child’s status was dependent on their mother’s, it meant that there was a little bit of opportunity for freedom—to be clear, it was rare—for people who could trace their lineage to a free woman.

Was Slavery Practiced in Utah Territory?

This is the most common place where we see accounts of enslaved people’s family histories in court records.

It’s so moving to read people recounting their family’s story, knowing that those stories were shaped in the context of such violence.

What does George Washington’s two-sided family tree reveal about the distinction between genealogy and inheritance in early America?

I’ve written about George Washington’s genealogy work in a couple of different places, including in Lineage. It’s really revealing to see how he wrote a multi-generational family tree on one side of that piece of paper, which represented a line of descent for Washington family property, and on the other side, a list of people who inherited property.

In Washington’s Virginia, it’s a perfect illustration of the two sides of inheritance, and of genealogy. I think it also helps us to understand how tracing someone’s family could mean very different things for people in different legal circumstances.

Handwritten George Washington family tree linking inheritance and genealogy in early America. — George Washington’s handwritten family tree. By creating a branching chart on aged parchment to explicitly trace both his lineage and property inheritance, Washington illustrated how genealogy in early America served as a vital legal tool for securing wealth and social status. Image courtesy of the Library of Congress.

The Archive of the Intimate: Vernacular Genealogy

— People kept family records in a variety of ways, including traditional family trees, passed-down stories, and stitch samplers.

How did economic prosperity affect whether someone kept a family history?

People with means had not only the education and the equipment (pens and paper) to write family records, but also the time.

So, was genealogy work restricted to those who had money?

Not at all. Money made genealogy easier, but there were so many different ways that family histories were made. Consider just a few:

Other Records: They could be recorded by someone else (like those in court records).
Oral Accounts: Someone could tell another about an ancestral record, which could then be passed down.
Scrap Paper: Family histories could be written on scrap paper and tucked into account books.
Page Margins. They could also be written on the margins of an almanac (the most common print book owned by early Americans).

One thing that we know from the sheer variety and volume of kinds of genealogy made in early America is that it wasn’t only for prosperous people—far from it.

Why did “homely” objects like stitched samples and German fraktur certificates matter?

I call this variety of materials “vernacular genealogy.” Unlike what we might think of as formal genealogical work that profiles many generations, these detail one to three generations, and are in a variety of different materials and formats.

But as with those fraktur birth and marriage certificates, these materials could also serve as raw material for longer genealogical reflections. For example, many 18th-century genealogical materials are multi-generational accounts, showing they drew on these kinds of records.

So, they really matter in at least two ways. One is that they show this variety. And the second is that they can show us how people engaged in collecting and sharing materials, as we see them layered to create other family history materials.

Also, can I just say how beautiful I find so many of these objects? Not only the fraktur, which is so clearly aesthetically pleasing, but also so many family records created on single sheets, or in small record books, or within accounts, where the creator will arrange the names and perhaps highlight some, or draw a box, or figures, or designs. They really show just what people invested of themselves in these materials.

Decorative fraktur birth certificate showing vernacular genealogy in early America. — An ornately decorated fraktur birth and baptismal certificate for Elisabeth Singli. These colorful documents are examples of “vernacular genealogy,” showing how everyday people in early America invested deeply in recording their family ties. Image courtesy of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Rare Book Department.

What creative methods must a historian use when records are designed to erase people?

I think this goes back to the issue of not thinking of genealogy solely as something a person wrote about multiple generations, but rather as a variety of expressions of family connection.

That helps us see how court records, for example, even as they were compelling information about families, also provided an opportunity to express and record family histories. Or that tax records in any era were a way to document family connections (by household or, in the case of enslaved people, as they were taxed as property).

Many scholars and community folks have also pointed to the ways in which material culture passed down holds family histories. That’s an important dimension, too—whether something of high monetary cost or not, simple or ornate objects often came with family histories.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich and ‘A House Full of Females’

In short, the important thing is not to imagine that all these kinds of materials could be used to create genealogy, but that they were themselves a form of genealogical work. That came out of a culture that encouraged and, in many cases, required genealogical knowledge.

And in the end, as for any research, it just means going to lots of collections and looking at lots and lots and lots of material!

Reflections on the 250th and Modern Identity

— America’s history comes to life when handling artifacts and examining the influence of communities and families on traditional narratives.

Who do you argue that it is time to move beyond “Great Man” narratives?

There are many narratives about American history that can inspire us to strive for the values of democracy, equality, and liberty. But some of those same narratives about the founding era associate those ideals with an independent, individual actor, when most people—then and now—live in communities and families.

Family connections were such critical and infrastructural aspects of how the United States was imagined and built. Some of what I refer to as infrastructures were detrimental to communities and families.

Consider the laws of slavery and the incredibly complex and regularly violent way the British Empire and then the US interacted with Indigenous people and tribal nations. Many of those same structures were designed to support and advance other families and communities (mostly settlers).

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Is it unpatriotic to emphasize the troubling aspects of American history?

People often ask me whether it’s counterproductive or discourages patriotism, especially among kids. I think the opposite.

Our fullest history, our most honest engagement with the past, is patriotic! It certainly is part of my commitment. It helps us build on a firmer foundation. And it highlights just how important families have always been, not just emotionally but also as part of our economic, legal, and political design.

Does media coverage of genealogy obscure how it still functions as a system of power?

Absolutely. You can look at how genealogy is portrayed in the media to see that it is still hard for us to integrate genealogy—the subject of popular television shows with an enthusiastic base of hobbyists—with economic and political structures.

The same holds true for viewing genealogy strictly through a “DNA” lens. Most people understand that there have been nefarious government programs based on genealogy (the Nazis’ murderous regime against Jews is an important example).

But for Americans, it’s harder to see how genealogy—the idea that someone is defined by what we know about the family—can be shaping our politics. Sometimes I think it’s a bit easier if we connect it to data collection, which is pretty ubiquitous.

After decades in the archives, what stands out as the most poignant reminder of the “power of connection”?

There are so many! Perhaps that’s the point of having tracked down and sifted through so many diverse kinds of materials that represent people’s attachment to family. Whether created in the intensity of moments of hope and love or grief, or an administrative or legal procedure, these materials are intense. I’ve yet to read a piece of family history created in the 18th century that I didn’t find moving.

But there are some that strike me—not necessarily because of their particular intensity, but because of how I came to see them.

Devan-Simpson family record

That was the case with the Devan-Simpson family record, which I use to open a chapter in Lineage. It shows the families of a white family and a Black family (both enslaved and free). The relationship among the individuals was complex in ways that still aren’t clear.

When I saw that family record for sale, I flagged Tom Knoles at the American Antiquarian Society (AAS). Luckily, he bought it for the organization, so anyone can now see and use it there.

It’s a great reminder that there are so many family stories that are still in a family’s hands—or someone else’s—and that historians have to tread carefully about what we can know or think we can know about a family’s history.

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About the Scholar

Dr. Karin Wulf is a Professor of History and the Beatrice and Julio Mario Santo Domingo Director and Librarian of the John Carter Brown Library at Brown University. Her academic research focuses on the intersection of gender, family, and political culture within eighteenth-century British America. She is the author of several significant works, most notably her latest book, Lineage, which explores how the systemic practice of genealogy in early America served as a vital legal and cultural infrastructure. Holding a Ph.D. in history from Johns Hopkins University, Wulf previously served as the Executive Director of the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture. Through her decades of archival work, she brings a uniquely structural perspective to this interview, illuminating how ancestry and family ties fundamentally shaped the developing nation.