Wilford Woodruff at the Crossroads of American Genealogy

In the mid-1830s, a New England man began to write the first of what would be volumes of journals covering more than six decades of his life and experiences, reflections, and family history. Born in 1807, he grew up in the Connecticut River Valley town where his great-great-great-great grandfather was an early seventeenth-century proprietor. Ample evidence of his family's prominence in the community and nearby, including the church a great uncle built, persists today. Sure of the biblically-inspired significance of lineage, he became, like many New England men before him, a chronicler. He kept careful, even elaborate family records, and he pursued genealogical research through new American historical and genealogical organizations as well as in local record offices in England to tell him of the ancestry he could not learn from near kin or local institutions. Like many Americans, he was deeply interested not only in his own family but in the family histories of the English aristocracy and monarchy. Though he absorbed family histories from the lore and record-rich environment he had grown up in, he complained about those who had failed to keep the good church and town records that he and so many others in similar communities relied upon to flesh out their genealogy; also like many before him and many of his peers, he became a historian of his church and community as well as his family. In so many of these particulars and more, he was like New England men who had come before him and those who were his contemporaries and successors.1Yet Wilford Woodruff's life as a genealogist is not only indicative of important continuities but helps mark the crossroads of American genealogy. Along one axis lay the deeply rooted traditions of family history he inherited, and along another, the innovations in technology and institutional power he helped harness to genealogy. As he began and continued his journals and his own family histories, he exemplified the experiences and practices of New England settlers of the seventeenth and eighteenthth centuries who were already steeped in the expectations of religiously-minded and governmentally-assisted genealogy.By the late nineteenth century, Woodruff helped propel a new collective approach to aggregating family histories, but the earlier chronology of genealogy's history that Woodruff helps highlight is important, especially as the rise and progress of American genealogy is now generally told as a new, newly American, and modern story. In the nineteenth century, two developments made genealogy seem so new and so modern: the explosion of print culture and the founding of historical societies and other institutions devoted to genealogical research (and then, connected to the first, publication of genealogical materials). The Mormon commitment to genealogy drew from and accelerated these phenomena through its institutional potency and launched American genealogy into the twentieth century as a more broadly accessible collective activity.2 As the fourth president of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, in 1894, Woodruff announced that to respect the doctrine of baptizing the dead revealed by Joseph Smith decades earlier, Mormons should energetically and systematically research their families.3 And to that end, in 1895, Woodruff prompted the founding of the Genealogical Society of Utah.In recent histories, Woodruff appears as one of the innovators of American genealogical practice, reflective of the increasing influence and impact of Mormons through the twentieth and now twenty-first centuries. But he was equally and just as importantly an inheritor and adaptor of a long and deep tradition of British-American genealogy. By connecting a longstanding British-American religious, political, and legal investment in genealogy with Mormon institutional commitment to family history, Woodruff highlights both the longer history of American genealogy and the structural roots of its success in media and digital technologies. At the crossroads of tradition and innovation, of public and intimate genealogical imperatives, Woodruff illuminates both the convergences and trajectories in the kinds of genealogy that Americans articulated, embraced, and practiced across centuries.The family records that Wilford Woodruff researched and then wrote and decorated with care in his 1830s diaries echoed the dynamics of early American family history-making for people of even modest privilege. They recorded babies born, and children dying too young; they registered marriages and life hopes, and more losses and deaths. Following this long tradition of British-American family recordation, Woodruff included birth, marriage, and death dates. He was interested in the details—how old someone was when they died, sometimes to the month—and in accuracy, going back to correct the records when he could. But like many keeping family histories, he left multiple versions of his core family information, surely discussing and sharing it in conversation, but also rewriting it in notebooks, correspondence, and then sometimes in more formal formats such as a printed text.Woodruff also drew the family records in his early journals with what would become a graphic style characteristic of these diaries. His penmanship was distinctive, but he also illustrated his records, giving them specific shapes and forms that echoed both some earlier styles of genealogy (echoing gravestones in particular) but also with emerging conventions. In an essay on "The Early Diaries of Wilford Woodruff, 1835–39" in the volume Foundational Texts of Mormonism, Laurel Ulrich analyzed Woodruff's early journaling practices, connecting them with both the monumental and daily occurrences of his life and his emerging LDS faith. She also looked specifically at his early family records in this context and, as she also wrote about in her book about plural marriage, House Full of Females, showed how those records echoed the ornamental printed and drawn record pages that were becoming common in the first half of the nineteenth century. Formatted family record pages were being printed in Bibles by the many thousands, and innumerable others were printed, painted, or drawn for purchase or created on commission. The arch and some scrolling above, and those basic categories of life cycle information as they understood it—birth, marriage, and death—in the structured column format for this essential information was particularly common for the period.4The other common feature of Woodruff's family record was the emphasis he placed on men's lineages. Thus while his own family history was described as that of his father, Aphek, even his first wife Phoebe Whitemore Carter Woodruff's family history was rendered as her father's: "Ezra Carter's Family Record." Wilford and Phoebe's family was likewise styled as "Wilford Woodruff's Family Record." This might seem obvious, reflecting the strongly patriarchal thrust of Mormonism, but in fact, it echoed both this dominant patrilineal representation as well as the gesture to maternal ancestry typical of the British-American genealogical pattern.5In his family records, Woodruff also, like so many others before and around him, was prompted both by the strong tradition of family history awareness and record keeping but also by the ways that key life moments provided an emotional and practical prompt to its production.Woodruff's poignant renderings of grief, for example, included a sketch of a coffin with an epitaph for Asahel H. Woodruff, who "DIED at Terre Haut I.a. Oct. 18th 1838 AGED 24 years." Asahel was the son of Woodruff's father, Aphek, and stepmother, Azubah Hart Woodruff, who married when Wilford was just a toddler. Asahel was seven years his junior. In the journal, Woodruff elaborated on what he had written inside the coffin, noting not only the fact of Asahel's death but that they had not seen each other for seven years. They had corresponded frequently, though, and had been expecting to see one another imminently. "We both had long anticipated much upon an interview with each other but my hopes were suddenly blasted. I did not hear of his death untill the day previous to my arival at his dwelling." This relationship and this loss continued to be deeply meaningful. When Woodruff initiated baptisms for the dead among his closest family in Nauvoo in the spring and summer of 1842, his mother, grandparents, and great-grandparents were all among them—but Asahel was among the first, on the first date as listed in his journal record of the event.6The way Woodruff further framed and sketched in his journals (marriage—his own, joyful and solemn, his child's birth—full of promise and thus all that space to be filled up! and death—of his beloved younger half brother, a brutal loss represented by the coffin) echo the ways that across the long eighteenth-century family histories and family records were often produced in similarly intense moments. To take one from many examples, a century earlier, the Bostonian Andrew Oliver was as unlike Woodruff as a free New England man could be. Wealthy and politically connected colony-wide, as an official of the crown Oliver (in)famously was charged with enforcing the Stamp Act. When three family members died in the 1730s, he bound their published funeral sermons together and added in manuscript to this volume extensive genealogical information about the full family. But he also hand drew the extra thick black borders on many pages. Perhaps a calming practice, that stroking of the pen back and forth to create the thick, intensely funereal borders, Oliver was also, like Woodruff, marrying some of the forms of print—in his case, those mourning borders that printers pulled out to mark for royal or other major deaths—with manuscript.7The genealogical culture and practice that Oliver was imbued with and Woodruff had already inherited and was beginning to adapt was particular to colonial, settler British America—the subject of my forthcoming book, Lineage: Genealogy and the Power of Connection in Early America.8 Just as people and cultures around the world have adapted and practiced genealogy in ways that suited their social and political needs, British Americans were exquisitely attuned to the imperatives of genealogy. For them, the Protestant Bible (which not only began with genealogy but turned on the most consequential lineage of them all—Jesus's descent from the House of David), the English laws of property, including slavery, almostentirely-about inheritance, and the monarchical form of government which was consumed with issues of succession—all worked to underscore the critical importance of familial connection.9The evidence of genealogical production in eighteenth-century British America is so pervasive and voluminous that I have been absolutely awash in research. The material evidence fills libraries and archives, as well as museums. It is both public and privately produced evidence of the significance of family history. Because there is so much of it, I have taken to posting examples of material that I found in the course of my research that does not appear in my book and that I keep running across. I post on my Instagram account, and I often write up short pieces on a blog on my website just to have a chance to frame and share more of it than I could in the book.10The premise of Lineage is that genealogy has a history and that genealogical practices are historically and culturally specific—genealogy is not a neutral, natural, or universal phenomenon. None of this should be controversial or even surprising, but for odd reasons has been slow to be appreciated by scholars and the genealogically-enthusiastic public alike. Through a wealth of evidence from Georgia to Maine, I argue that we can see eighteenth-century British-American genealogy as having a very specific cultural logic and structure.This particular British-American genealogical, cultural practice is what shaped Wilford Woodruff as he and his contemporaries began to accelerate, scale up, and help to fundamentally reshape American genealogy—though not, perhaps, in the ways we might think.Individuals and families produced genealogy in many different ways and forms. I refer to this genealogy as "vernacular" because it could have a local quality and was mostly informal. While the materials I gesture to here can be assumed to be produced by at least middling and literate people, the evidence of working and unfree people's genealogical informationis equally pervasive (in New England town warning out cases, for example, or freedom suits). Genealogy in British America was not only the work of people like Woodruff who produced their family records and registers. It was so potent because it was both an affective and an instrumental practice. It was the work of both individuals and institutions. This may be clearest to us in the case of partus sequitur ventrem, the law of maternal heritability that made slaves of enslaved women's children.11 Here we clearly see how the state, the institutions of law and governance, worked hard to make a family's relationships a matter of state interest. And we can see, too, how sinuously the state and individual interests would cooperate.Genealogy was always consequential. People regularly went to court, for example, with documentation and testimony about their family relationships. Those relationships could gain—or lose—status or property, including freedom. Court records throughout the eighteenth century are rife with references to the indenture of children of Black and white, free and unfree parents, along with oral testimony solicited by the court. This is just one example of the many kinds of court actions people took to clarify their own and their family's status vis-a-vis a recounting of genealogy. More prosaically, people went to probate court to sort out who was entitled to what after a death. The edifice of recordation was built partly to ensure that, in simple cases, such as with widows or other heirs who did not protest, things might be quite straightforward. For the British, property was what could be passed on. William Blackstone's many publications about law included lengthy directions about how to assess kin relations for property distribution. We see that in more modest directions to local justices of the peace.12 Eighteenth-century court personnel simply had to be competent genealogists.It has not been easy for historians to see the importance of genealogy in early America despite the extraordinarily pervasive evidence. Perhaps it is a little like fish trying to identify water; they just could not see it. In the very first sentence of Ron Chernow's Pulitzer-prize-winning biography of George Washington, he wrote that: "The crowded career of George Washington afforded him little leisure to indulge his vanity or gratify his curiosity by conducting genealogical research into his family." It is a curious opening meant to separate Washington himself from the multitudes of those who would be interested in his family history. But it conveys something important about how historians have thought about genealogy as a subject and as a practice. In Chernow's rendering, genealogy could only be about vanity or curiosity.13In fact, George Washington himself shows us something quite different, for he understood its practical import. Those who know a bit about Washington's biography know how scarce are the records of his early years—anything before the late 1750s is rare indeed. Among those rare items, however, is one that, despite its having rested in the Library of Congress in one of the handsome red leather-bound volumes of Washington's letters and other material, was miscataloged and then not included in any editions of the Washington Papers. It is a family tree that George Washington wrote in 1749, beginning with his great-grandparents, John and Ann Pope Washington. John Washington immigrated to Virginia in the 1650s, while Ann Pope was the daughter of a wealthy Virginia planter-politician. Their combined wealth, part of which was her father's gift when they married, was the origin of Washington's estates on the Northern Neck, including what would become Mount Vernon. The Washingtons were part of the colony's political and economic elite, and though they were not among the wealthiest generations, they would continue to marry into ever greater wealth and prominent connections.Carefully accounting for the descendants of John and Ann Washington as they pertained to his own lineage, the young George Washington excluded from this family tree, for example, his father's cousins and his own cousins by his uncle, his father's brother, John Washington. But he included all the children of each of his direct ancestors. Such detail was extended to Butler Washington, the first child of his father, Augustine Washington, and his first wife, Jane Butler. Butler Washington was born and died in 1716, sixteen years before Washington himself was born, but he claimed a place in his famous half-brother's family. We can date this important document partly because of how Washington included the children of his direct ancestors. He included the birth of his niece Mildred, his brother Lawrence's daughter, in late 1748, but not that of her sister, Sarah, two years later.14Just a few years after writing this family tree, Washington turned the paper over to write "A List of Tithables"—a list of the enslaved men and women on whom the Washingtons would pay a tax to Virginia. This was most likely written in early 1752, after George and Lawrence Washington returned from a trip to Barbados taken in hopes of curing the latter's health, but before Lawrence died in July of that same year. All of the enslaved individuals listed as "Tithables"—Acco, Ben, Franck, Oney, Jack, Judah, Nan, Moll, Will, and Judah—can also be found in either Augustine Washington's will, Lawrence Washington's estate inventory, or memos of estate distribution among the surviving brothers, from the 1740s or early 1750s.15 For the enslaved men and women that George Washington detailed on his list, genealogy was instrumental in two ways. The British-American laws of inheritance that reassigned them from one man's estate to another's was patrilineal. But by the Virginia law we know as partus sequitur ventrem, the child of an enslaved woman was enslaved. Thus in a perversion of the Anglo emphasis on the patriline, the status of mothers was crucial. This one document, then, from the hands of our first president, illustrates both the double-edged power of genealogy in early America—and his clear comprehension of its importance. Washington clearly demonstrates and we can see throughout British America, that genealogy was both a private and a public concern, practiced by families and by governments alike.We can just as clearly see the potent combination of intimate familial and state interests in the family accounts that Wilford Woodruff wrote many decades later and in the types of materials he could rely on to produce them. He knew the family histories of his grandparents, in part because all around him, the records of those relationships were being collected. There were church records, town records, and eventually the state of Connecticut's records, all of which Woodruff and his neighbors, their ancestors, and descendants helped to produce and then could draw upon in making family histories.Church records listed baptisms as well as births and marriages, deaths and burial locations. Connecticut church records are full of Woodruffs who descended from the original settlers, Matthew and Hannah Woodruff, who immigrated from England in the early 1640s. They arrived in Boston, moved on to Hartford, and then became founding proprietor-claimants of Farmington (now in Hartford County). Some along the male descendants line that led to Wilford Woodruff moved as far as Stonington (also in Hartford County), but across the eighteenth century, there were plenty of Woodruffs elsewhere in Connecticut; Matthew's son Matthew, for example, settled and was buried in Milford in New Haven, and the church records there hold a profusion of Woodruff vital records.16 The marriage record for Wilford Woodruff's great-great-grandfather, Joseph Woodruff, and his second wife Elizabeth Curtice, was captured in an early twentieth-century genealogical endeavor to collect vital information from Connecticut towns. Still an essential resource, the list of sources that the Barbour Collection encompasses suggests the range of records where Woodruffs in Farmington appeared; in church records of Farmington proper, for example, the First Congregational records included this Woodruff marriage in 1708.17The town of Farmington and Hartford County also held tightly to probate records, wills, and inventories. Both the property and the relationships of generations of Woodruffs were richly documented in these materials, with their wills standing as evocative records of these familial connections as well as how they understood and valued them. The original settler Matthew Woodruff's 1682 will, for example, seems to privilege his youngest son Samuel by leaving him his "house, and my homestead and my meddow land" close by, rather than the traditional provision of those to the eldest son (though all the children seem to have been minimally provided for in the will). Successive wills for John Woodruffs across the centuries, for example, are similarly full of familial dynamics, preserved for the use of their immediate descendants and later generations. There were tender references in the midst of practical matters, as when John Woodruff left "to my loving wife all the waring lining in the house excepting my childrens." When Wilford Woodruff's great-grandfather died in 1789, he carefully distributed a bit of money to each of his living children, even Wilford's grandfather Eldad, the seventh of ten. Then when Eldad died in 1806, he made Wilford's father Aphek his "sole executor to this my last will and testament."18Scholars have looked at the practices of record keeping across the colonies, finding a mix of diligence, though it is clear that in all of the British colonies there was an expectation that records would be kept and accumulated to account for family relationships.19 The Connecticut records were sufficiently well preserved that by the early twentieth th century, they could sort and file these estate papers in docket folders, and then in the next decades, the LDS and the state projects would microfilm and then digitize them. Woodruff would not have considered himself as "data" or his family's records as part of an aggressive data collection. But he, like those around him, understood the logic of that collection, and he understood that institutional records were invaluable. We may think of systematic recordation as a function of the nineteenth century or later; we may consider eighteenth-century records spotty or unsophisticated, but time after time, the attention and energy with which family information was collected and recorded in the earlier period tells a different story. The earliest laws of the British colonies and subsequent legislation and clear expectations of the recorders required this work.Church and estate records were not the only ways that familial relationships were publicly documented in the eighteenth century. Censuses, beginning in 1790 but also in patchy local tax and census records earlier, would tell who lived with whom. A census involved a visit and a recounting; it was a community event undertaken by men who knew their neighbors and their neighbors' families. There were dozens of Woodruffs in the 1790 census, including Wilford Woodruff's grandfather Eldad with a household of nine adults. That census also showed that there were several enslaved people in Farmington. Newspapers also reported significant family events such as deaths, including Eldad's in 1806.20The local environment, including the built landscape, was also rich with the material of genealogy. When Wilford Woodruff was writing his family history records into his journals in the late 1830s, he was also recording visits to the cemeteries where his ancestors were buried. He copied into his journal the inscription from his mother's gravestone: "A Pleasing form his maternal grandmother would follow in the next year.21Informed by and marinated in this genealogical culture, of course, Wilford Woodruff was no ordinary genealogist. But for one of the most prominent early Mormon converts, the longtime historian of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, founder of the Utah Genealogical Society, and a crucial player in implementing church practices related to ancestry, family history was a matter of grave urgency.The center of the Mormon church and community, the family was also the route to salvation for millennia of ancestors who died without hearing the church's teaching. While genealogy in America acquired, if not fresh imperatives—as we will see, these remained largely constant—it assumed significant new capacity in the nineteenth century, and Mormons played a big part in its institutionalization. In the spring of 1820, in rural western New York, Joseph Smith had had a vision. In this, his first vision, the American prophet and founder of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints was told by God and Jesus that all other Christian denominations were "believing in incorrect doctrines"—but also that he should expect more such visions to instruct his path and the path of what would become his followers and co-religionists. Further revelations affirmed, among other things, the significance of baptism, and in the summer of 1840, in the city he named Nauvoo, Illinois, the new headquarters for the thousands of LDS converts, Smith first preached about the baptism for the dead. The Saints "began to perform baptisms in nearby rivers and streams in behalf of relatives, friends, and prominent people" and would soon move this ritual practice to the Mormon temple. By 1842 Smith directed that "baptisms for the dead should be carefully documented," promising that what the Saints "record on earth shall be recorded in Heaven."An energetic practice of pursuing genealogical information to locate and baptize ancestors was underway. The fascinating story of early genealogical work undertaken by the Latter-day Saints, including for-hire genealogy, and the nascent emergence of a family history library and historian's office, tracked with developments further east. Historical societies with deeply genealogical programs of local history and family-focused antiquarianism were springing up all over, including the New England Historic and Genealogical Society.By 1894, Mormons, spurred by Woodruff, established the Genealogical Society of Utah to facilitate their work. The Genealogical Society of Utah would quickly develop a collection and archiving program that would thrive over the next century; in 1987, it emerged as the Family History Department of the LDS Church. The LDS Church is now the largest single holder and disseminator of historical records pertaining to individuals and families. With its ambitious microfilming and digitization of public records, its FamilySearch website, and nearly 5,000 family history research centers worldwide, the church has made the fruits of its genealogical mission available to a global community of family history researchers. Firmly allied through these research resources with the commercial and technological but also the entertainment features of the genealogy industry, the project of family research that Joseph Smith set in motion in the early nineteenth century and Wilford Woodruff institutionalized in the late nineteenth century is part of an extraordinary practice that transcends religious practice—in fact for its users may be largely defined apart from it.22Both Mormons and historical societies, each producing a narrative about why genealogy was important as well as generating resources for the study of family history, contributed to the awareness and intensification of genealogy as a hobby and pastime in the twentieth century. Stained by elitism at best, racism and eugenics at worst, genealogy in the United States also became an important articulation of grounding and belonging for groups such as African Americans originally marginalized or explicitly excluded from either Mormon or society-based lineage seeking. Still, historical societies and heritage societies emphasizing the value of unbroken American lineages rooted in the colonial era gave rise to a caricature of genealogy associated with the aspirations and assertions of largely Anglophile American strivers.23Yet when late nineteenth-century Americans were genealogically enthusiastic, they—and subsequent historians—may have forgotten they were following a well-worn path. Just as Chernow breezes past the foundational importance of genealogy for George Washington, plenty of Franklin scholars pay little or no attention to the beginning of that quintessentially American's individualistic autobiography—where he writes about his family history and also about a genealogical research trip he took with his son William to England in the 1750s.A language of the purely private, even hobbyist value of genealogy continues to pervade its most popular forms, including genealogy websites such as Ancestry.com and genealogy media. In the hugely popular television show hosted by Henry Louis Gates, Finding Your Roots, Gates's dogged researchers reveal for each episode's guests details of their family background,