At the 22nd Annual Marjorie Hinckley Lecture, Karin Wulf shared how genealogy shaped America's earliest systems.
“Genealogy was everywhere in early America,” Karin Wulf says.
From the beginning of her lecture, she challenged the idea that genealogy was a leisure activity or a matter of vanity.
“Genealogy was not to the side, and it is not marginal to the culture, society, and politics of the Revolutionary period,” she says.
Instead, she argues that genealogy was intertwined into daily life and institutional structures.
Wulf was the invited speaker at the 22nd annual Marjorie Pay Hinckley Lecture at Brigham Young University on February 5. She is director and librarian of The John Carter Brown Library and professor of history at Brown University. Her lecture titled “Genealogy at America’s Founding” explored how family history shaped the legal and political world of the Early America.
Positioning her remarks in anticipation of the United States’ 250th anniversary, Wulf reminded the audience that the founding era of America is “the foundation on which we stand.”
This period produced both “science and democracy” and systems of “slavery and indigenous dispossession.” To understand that complexity, Wulf explains that historians must look beyond the familiar political narratives and recognize the central role of family.
Wulf shared examples of elite families creating elaborate visual family trees, ordinary women stitching samplers to document births and deaths, almanacs and scraps of paper preserving family information, gravestones and cemetery maps recording relationships, and ministers and town clerks maintaining official marriage and birth records. These were not isolated acts of curiosity, instead they reflected a culture saturated with genealogical thinking.
Wulf then turned to the legal system, where genealogy functioned as infrastructure. In British American law, property ownership and inheritance depended on precisely mapped lines of descent. She described how William Blackstone’s influential Commentaries on the Laws of England devoted significant attention to understanding family relationships in order to determine who inherited property.
Genealogy structured economic power and public records reinforced that structure. Court cases over contested estates required proof of lineage. Freedom suits filed by enslaved individuals often hinged on maternal ancestry. In these cases, family relationships determined liberty or bondage.
The tension between intimacy and power came into sharp focus in Wulf’s discussion of George Washington. As a teenager, Washington carefully recorded six generations of his family lineage. On the reverse side of that same sheet of paper, however, he listed the names of enslaved individuals he inherited after his father and brother died.
“The genealogy made George Washington, but it also made these people slaves,” Wulf says.
The same system of inheritance that secured Washington’s wealth and status also ensured the hereditary enslavement of others. In that sense “genealogy was not only expressive, it was also extractive.” It provided identity, belonging, and authority for some, while enforcing subordination for others.
However, Wulf was careful not to reduce genealogy to systems of power alone. She described an array of small family record books created in moments of grief that reached into “the most intimate relationships and emotional contexts.” Genealogical documents preserved “loving family relationships, but also fraught and violent family dynamics.”
By the end of the lecture, Wulf returned to her central claim: “Family was not a marginal subject, but a central one.”
For early Americans, family determined social position, economic, and political authority. It explained how property moved, how power accumulated, and how inequality persisted. To overlook genealogy is to misunderstand the founding itself.
Maisey Thompson, a sophomore and biophysics major from St. George, Utah, attended the lecture out of personal interest and was surprised by how deeply embedded genealogical record-keeping has been across centuries.
“I find it so interesting how far back people have been keeping track of records and genealogy,” Thompson says. “We have the scriptures where they kept track of all that, but it's interesting to think that even the presidents were keeping track of genealogy.”
Reflecting on why the lecture matters for BYU students, Thompson connected Wulf’s historical argument to personal identity.
“That’s where your roots are,” she says. “So, you should learn where your ancestors come from, and you can find a better understanding of the people around you and yourself.”
For the BYU College of Family, Home, and Social Sciences, Wulf’s lecture spotlights the enduring significance of family as both a private and public force.
In early America, genealogy structured authority while also preserving memory and love. To study family history, Wulf demonstrated, is not to look to the margins of the past, but to its center.
Discover more about programs supported by the Marjorie Pay Hinckley Chair in Social Work and the Social Sciences.