Americans are obsessed with knowing more about their family tree: interest in genealogy goes back centuries in the U.S.

If, like me, you’ve been tempted to spit in a tube and send it to a DNA lab, you’re not alone. Americans have always cared a lot about where they came from. The current boom in genealogy – from Henry Louis Gates Jr.’s hit show Finding Your Roots (check out Julia Roberts’ emotional journey below) to the popularity of RootsTech’s family–history mega-conference – might look like a 21st-century fad. But in the U.S., this obsession goes way back.

Back in 1770, a 19-year-old named Hannah Waterman in Rhode Island stitched together her own family history in a 16-page notebook. It wasn’t decorative or sentimental. It was a blunt, handwritten record of births, deaths and disappearances – starting with her father, who died of smallpox in Suriname before she had even turned one.

Her account, as historian Karin Wulf notes in the Smithsonian Magazine, was typical of “vernacular genealogy,” the DIY ancestry records that Americans have kept for centuries.

Why are Americans so invested in genealogy?

One reason for this interest appears to be that it’s never just been personal. In colonial times, genealogy shaped everything from poor relief eligibility to pension claims. Family histories appeared in almanacs and newspapers, while girls sewed them into samplers that sometimes ended up as legal documents. After the American Revolution, widows used them to prove marriages to deceased soldiers.

Even the Founding Fathers got into it. Benjamin Franklin traced his roots back to England with the same energy he brought to kite-flying experiments. George Washington was drawing up his family tree in his teens, while also listing the enslaved people he’d inherited. That overlap of lineage and power wasn’t incidental – it was the point.

Today, as shown by the likes of the PBS series mentioned in my introduction, genealogy is mainstream. People want to know who they came from, and what that says about who they are. And DNA tech has made finding out a whole lot slicker.

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