It is the most important revolution in how we read in history:  the traditional form factor of books is dramatically altered after centuries.  Readers must alter how they read–not only how they physically manipulate these new books, but also how they remember a book’s content in their minds and discuss it with friends.  During the time period when the old format gradually supplants the new, there are lots of complainers who feel that the new way debases the reading experience as well as the content itself.  “I just don’t read that way!” they protest.

Do you think I’m talking about the rise of e-books?

I’m not — I’m talking about the replacement of scrolls with codexes (books) starting in the first century!

We genealogists know better than most how much history repeats itself, but it’s amazing to think that almost two millennia ago, people struggled to make the switch from one-sided, one-page scrolls to two-sided, many-page books just as we struggle to move from paper to screen.  We know why e-books are winning:  superior technology.  Codexes replaced scrolls for the same reason.  The breakdown into pages meant for the first time the reader could easily flip back and forth to different sections and reference passages in a clear way.  These advances enabled the early Christians to study and share scripture; it was they who popularized codexes.

Illustration by Joon Mo Kang via

Unfortunately, the e-book format reverses some of this progress.  On an e-reader, as in a scroll, it’s very difficult to read non-linearly.  This reason is partly why I am one of the hold-outs still without an e-reader.  I have rituals for how I mark my place, identify my favorite passages, and sometimes let myself skip ahead (bad!).  Instead of buying art, I line my walls with shelves of books, and when one catches my eye, I pull it down to skim my favorite parts.  How does any of this happen with an e-reader?

E-readers clearly win for making books more accessible, affordable, and portable.  But do they advance the actual experience of reading as codexes did?  Search engines and hyperlinks are useful, but surely I’m not just a curmudgeon when I say that the inability to flip through pages is more than the loss of my life-long habits, but a set-back for how we consume and absorb content?

In the first century Pliny wrote, “our civilization…[depends] very largely on the employment of paper,” upon which “the immortality of human beings depends.”  Though short-sighted about paper, he hits a kernel of truth in the transmission of knowledge.  Four centuries later Cassiodorus says it better.  A papyrus scroll “keeps a faithful witness of human deeds; it speaks of the past, and is the enemy of oblivion…There discourse is stored in safety, to be heard for ever with consistency.”  This is the principle that matters most:  a witness that transcends time. So long as we maintain that — whether via ink or pixels — we’ll progress.  The Greeks only read linearly, and look how they advanced human knowledge!

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With election season in high gear, publishers are releasing book after book about the Obamas.  In genealogy circles, the one getting the most coverage is Rachel Swarns’ American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White and Multicultural Ancestors of Michelle Obama, because Megan Smolenyak pointed out the book’s “considerable holes” and over-reliance on “family lore and flimsy evidence.”  But there is another new Obama book venturing into genealogical territory, Barack Obama: The Story.  It has gotten much attention for the embarrassing letters David Maraniss excerpts to show how a young Obama’s romantic and intellectual pursuits shaped him.  But as Jill Lepore argues in a recent New Yorker review, the book’s more provoking questions are about to what degree genealogy made the man.

That Obama’s Kansan mother and Kenyan father should have met at all at the University of Hawaii requires Maraniss to trace both lines to get at the roots of the Dunhams’ wanderlust and the Obamas’ Westernization. “The genealogy of any family involves countless what-if moments,” Maraniss writes.  “That is how history works, the history of families as well as the history of nations and movements.  Along with with the rational processes of biology and geography, of politics and economics, there come seemingly random connections that spin out profound and unintended consequences.”  But, as Lepore points out, are Maraniss’ intentions to make biographical or genealogical connections?

Weird stuff happens.  What does it mean? . . . In biography, order is to be found in the journey of life; in genealogy, in lines of descent.  In biography, the boy is father of the man.  In genealogy, the boy is a leaf on a branch on his family tree . . . [his] origins are inescapable . . . Inheritance is destiny.

In the first case Obama actively works to reconcile his unique identity, arriving at the proud conviction that “in no other country on Earth is my story even possible.”  In the other, with no regard for the man’s agency in how to receive his legacy, “ideological pseudo-historians” (Maraniss) use the genealogical line Obama knew the least to argue that his values are un-American and we’re “being governed according to the dreams of a Luo tribesman of the 1950s” (Dinesh D’Souza).

Let’s take a step back from the incendiary issues of Obama’s real or purported political goals to acknowledge which connections we make in our own lives.  Did you forge your own identity, or was it handed to you?  I believe that we do genealogy because of the joy in discovering exactly what were the random connections that spun out the most profound consequence of all — us!  But in our day-to-day lives, it’s our mental biographies, re-written in the aftermath of each new experience, that record our evolving sense of self.

To me the biography vs. genealogy argument underlying Maraniss’ book deserves more consideration than whether American Tapestry was a correct and complete genealogical study.  The latter discussion may make us better genealogists, but the former will make us more thoughtful people.

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