Genealogy is the study of family. Most genealogists spend a great deal of time working on their own family tree. Professional genealogists often work on other people’s family trees. In election years, or at least in this one, it seems that politicians want to use genealogy as a weapon to use against their opponents. I find this to be a very strange choice.
It isn’t unusual for a politician to let potential voters know that he or she is married and has children. If I had to guess, the purpose of this is to make the candidate look like a family oriented person. It doesn’t usually go much farther than that. However, this election year there has been a lot of emphasis on the family tree of various candidates.
The current brouhaha involves the ancestry of Elizabeth Warren. She is a Democrat who is running in the 2012 United States Senate election in Massachusetts against incumbent Republican Scott Brown. Brown has implied that Warren lied about having Cherokee ancestry. He has also implied that she used her minority status to advance her career.
From there, it has turned into a war being waged via genealogy research. Christopher Child, who is a genealogist with the New England Historic and Genealogy Society, dug up evidence that shows that Elizabeth Warren really does have Cherokee ancestry. He found that she had a great-great-great grandmother named O.C. Sarah Smith. Sarah is listed on her son’s 1894 marriage license. On that document, O.C. Sarah Smith is listed as Cherokee. This makes Elizabeth Warren 1 / 32 Cherokee.
The next day, a news article at the Boston Herald said that the marriage certificate found by the New England Historic and Genealogy Society was actually an electronic transcript. There are people who are not accepting it as evidence that Elizabeth Warren has Cherokee ancestry until such time as the actual marriage record is located, or a photographic copy of it is discovered.
There also was an article written by Micheal Patrick Leahy that is titled “No Credible Evidence for Warren’s Claim to Native American Ancestry”. In short, the article discusses exactly why Mr. Leahy is making that statement. In the first sentence of the article, he points out that genealogy is his hobby.
As I said earlier, genealogy is the study of family. I believe it is meant to be used as a tool to learn more about one’s own family. It is a good way to learn more about your ancestors and to find living relatives that you have lost touch with or that you have never met before. It feels very strange to have the techniques used in genealogy research become a tool that a politician can use to cause harm to the opposing candidate.
Image by shoshananknits on Flickr