The Read: Raffi Khatchadourian, "How Your Family Tree Could Catch a Killer", New Yorker Nov. 15 2021
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
No Cookbook Survivor tomorrow, as I’m doing something relatively simple (a small rib roast plus mashed potatoes and mushrooms). Enjoy the start of 2022: let’s hope it’s going to be a better year.
In terms of reading, what better to do over the quiet week between Christmas and New Year’s than catch up on the last month of New Yorker issues piled up on my desk?
Raffi Khatchadourian’s article on how genetic databases originally designed for genealogical inquiries are being used in criminal investigation especially stuck with me as I worked through the stack, so I thought I’d talk about it briefly here, if not in my usual format for this column.
One compelling part of the article is just the career of CeCe Moore, who seems like a beautiful example of what people who extol liberal education hold out as its possible outcome: bright student who went to college despite her family’s lack of support for that decision, wanting to major in music but switching when her professors refused to endorse her interest in musicals, ending up as an actor and involved in casting, then moving into genealogical research and from there into using genetic data to help people with inquiries—including law enforcement.
I had some of the concerns with that outcome—the use of these databases to identify criminal suspects—for reasons shared by some of the people profiled in the article. The data that is being used wasn’t shared with criminal investigation in mind, there are zero statutory or regulatory safeguards governing its use, and there are plenty of imaginable abuses of this information by government authorities or private interests. Gattaca doesn’t seem terribly remote or implausible if you let your imagination run a little. I also worry a lot about an issue that the article doesn’t really dwell on much, which is the reliability and autonomy of the labs performing this kind of testing. I recall law enforcement officials treating an earlier era of biological and genetic testing of evidence as the answer to all their problems, but there were at least several major examples of labs that either returned false outcomes through incompetence or actively shaded ambiguous samples or evidence towards prompted or desired interpretations. If we’re going to start doing this on a wider scale, we need national standards of reliability, independence and redundancy in genetic tests—and the labs and databases involved need to be rigorously walled off from direct contact with law enforcement or prosecutors’ offices.
What really stuck with me, however, is something that the article only lightly touches on. It’s a thought I’ve had about other stories about the aftermath of genealogical genetic testing within families. Mostly people take those tests out of idle curiosity about their own heritage or as part of a wider interest in their family histories. So many of the stories that have been published in the last five years about the consequences are about how such tests turn up news that people didn’t expect to hear: that someone in the family (living or dead) was actually switched at birth with someone else, that the tested person’s father is actually someone else than the person they thought was their father, that a sibling is only a half-sibling, that parents or grandparents were from somewhere completely different than they said or were concealing some aspect of their past, that they have half-siblings and cousins they never knew about in other families. In the article, Moore describes several cases where she was involved in extremely delicate and emotionally wrenching work with a person who was discovering that they were the product of an incestuous relationship.
Less wrenchingly, people who go looking through non-genetic genealogical data on a site like Ancestry.com or otherwise frequently discover that marriages and the date of birth of children line up in such a way that it’s clear that the couple were already expecting when they got married, that relatives were living in places or in situations that flatly contradict the stories they always told about themselves to family members, and so on.
What I take away from this is a mixture of fascination and anger. The fascination is tied to my scholarly ethos: this is great evidence that I think some smart historians in the near future will use to rewrite and rethink histories of the family, of labor, of household economies, and so on. Even the deceptions that people surround themselves with are valuable evidence about how they thought and felt—as well as reigning social ideologies of their time—but it also helps to really know that they were concealing something.
The anger is that it’s one more weight on a pile of evidence—perhaps the final weight—on just how much of the 20th Century’s air was fouled by repeated lying from multiple directions about “family values”, about monogamous nuclear-family domesticity, about sexual propriety, and so on. Whether we’re talking Sigmund Freud’s inability to credit that womens’ testimony of familial sexual violation or Ronald Reagan’s culture-war fantasies about the traditional family, this kind of genetic evidence is confirming what we already knew through testimony, through novels, through other kinds of intimate investigations of covered-up truths: that throughout the 20th Century, well before the “sexual revolution”, substantial numbers of American men and women had consensual and non-consensual sex outside of marriage; in-laws had secretive sex within one another in their extended families; men had sex with siblings, cousins, nieces, children. That white men had secret families with women of color—or kept rapes and assaults of women of color a secret. And that families often conspired to keep whatever had happened under wraps, sometimes punishing women for what men had done.
Reckoning with that truth has been happening one family at a time as testing has become more common, and I don’t doubt that there are a few families that have found a way to go back into comfortable lies or to look away from what they’d rather not know. And yes, sure, there are other families where no unexpected half-siblings or cousins turn up, where everyone is from wherever it is they said they were from, or where any surprises are pleasant or more complicatedly unsettling. That’s my own experience so far—we’ve verified that a family story about the deeds of a famous ancestor is completely true, but I’ve also discovered that one grandmother’s ancestors were likely slaveholders in 18th Century Virginia, which no one in my family knew or had mentioned before.
But it’s time for a national consciousness of what these tests are revealing: that a lot of families in the last half of the 20th Century covered up deeply unpleasant truths and indulged a tremendous amount of phony moralizing and self-righteousness devoted to the celebration of male-dominated heterosexual families that were often nothing like their conventionalized image.
Photo by Mr Cup / Fabien Barral on Unsplash