Source: Bigstock

Genealogy is a popular hobby, but the concept of the family tree has attracted remarkably little highbrow thinking in recent centuries.

Yet, the family tree is one of the most philosophically interesting entities imaginable. It seems hypothetical, like something Plato might have dreamed up. And yet it’s very real. Every human being who has ever lived, at least so far, has had a mother and a father; a maternal grandmother and grandfather and a paternal grandmother and grandfather; and so on, ad infinitum, back millions of years into our mammalian past.

Weirdly, Western intellectuals seldom think about the implications of family trees, even though they are as fundamental to human reality as anything can be.

For example, in philosophy, the term “genealogy” is traditionally used only in a metaphorical sense as a jargon term for skeptically tracing the history of ideas, as in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality and Foucault’s recounting of the evolution of European criminal justice from capital and corporal punishment to imprisonment in Discipline and Punish.

“Weirdly, Western intellectuals seldom think about the implications of family trees, even though they are as fundamental to human reality as anything can be.”

Likewise, the main use of the term “family tree” among academics is to track teacher-student relationships, such as Socrates-Plato-Aristotle.

Thus, it’s depressingly common for people who think of themselves as educated to assert that race does not exist, when race is instead obviously about who is in your family tree.

Americans, having been populated by people coming from the four corners of the earth, assume that race must be about looks. But looks are just a clue toward what’s really important: ancestry.

Hence, British books long used terms like “English race” and “Irish race,” even though if asked to sort 100 photos of indigenous inhabitants of the British Isles into English and Irish piles, you’d be lucky to get, say, two-thirds right. (In contrast, if asked to sort photos of non-Hispanic Americans into white and black piles, you’d get well over 90 percent correct.)

I recently joked on Substack in my post “The Pirate and the Pope” at the expense of the New York Times travel writer who discovered to his dismay that his beloved great-great-grandfather, the New Orleans pirate (good!)…

But he was still a pirate, a fact I clung to growing up in a Connecticut suburb that pasteurized difference in defense of propriety. Though my ancestry is 95 percent British Isles, being even a tiny bit descended from a pirate made me different, maybe a little glamorous and potentially wild.

…was also…a slave owner (so bad that “there could be no atonement”).

In response, a reader sent me this Oct. 24, 1959, Saturday Evening Post cover illustration by Norman Rockwell of a typical American boy of that era’s conception of his family tree:

While comic fiction, I think this is a pretty illustrative example of how Americans tend to think about family trees in general.

Norman Rockwell was perhaps the most controversial great American artist of the 20th century. As late as 2010, The Washington Post’s art critic Blake Gopnik was excoriating an exhibition of Rockwell illustrations furnished by Rockwell’s leading collectors, George Lucas and Steven Spielberg, for not being, well, Jewish leftist enough. The hate directed at the lovable Rockwell for much of the Long 20th Century remains inexplicably extraordinary.

But in 2025, it ought to be obvious that while Rockwell was an illustrator creating for the millions rather than a painter like Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko working for a few rich collectors (both of which are honorable careers), he was still a great American creative artist in the mode of John Ford, Howard Hawks, and Frank Capra.

The Norman Rockwell Museum explains:

In 1959, Rockwell began telling his life story to his son Tom Rockwell, who was ghost writing his autobiography, ‘My Adventures as an Illustrator.’ Recording his family history may have inspired Rockwell to trace the lineage of an American family in a painting, as the final chapter is devoted to a day-by-day account of how ‘Family Tree’ was created.

Family Tree was the illustration Rockwell worked on longest and hardest.

The basic structure for the painting, a tree, is taken from a twelfth-century Dutch family tree, a photo of which was found for Rockwell by the reference librarian at the Berkshire Athenaeum…. The consistency of family features through the generations is assured by Rockwell’s use of the same model for either the man or the woman in each couple on the tree.

The lineage begins with a pirate and a Spanish princess, taken by the pirate from a sinking Spanish galleon. The galleon is based on a painting by Rockwell’s favorite illustrator of historical subjects, Howard Pyle, whose initials are on the treasure chest.

Rockwell loved the idea of having the “all-American” boy descend from a pirate and his stolen Spanish princess, though it troubled his friend and therapist Erik Erikson.

Yes, Norman Rockwell, that epitome of American mental health, had a German Freudian psychoanalyst. After all, it was the 1950s, so of course he did.

“Do you think you ought to start off the family with him, a cutthroat, a barbarian?” Erikson asked. Rockwell experimented with changing the pirate to a Puritan, then a buccaneer, but finally returned to the original. “Everybody,” he said, “had a horse thief or two in his family.”

So…

8 Generations Ago: The lad’s great-great-great-great-great-great-great-grandparents were a ferocious pirate of the Spanish Main and his captured demure Spanish princess.

7 Generations Ago: Their somewhat friendlier-looking son, wearing the tricorne hat popular among sailors in the 18th century, appears to have become, perhaps, a British naval officer of the Jack Aubrey mold.

6 Generations Ago: His foppish son in the late-18th-century powdered wig had ascended to near-aristocratic wealth, perhaps due to his father’s prize-taking in the Seven Years’ War.

5 Generations Ago: His top-hatted son (perhaps a younger son who migrated to America due to primogeniture?) appears to have become a prosperous middle-states American businessman of the Abraham Lincoln generation.

4 Generations Ago: The businessman’s two sons served on opposite sides in the War of Brother Versus Brother in 1861–1865.

The Union soldier takes an intelligent-looking Northern bride, while his Confederate brother takes a thoughtless-looking Southern wife in the Scarlett O’Hara vein.

3 Generations Ago: The Union soldier’s daughter marries a dour Protestant clergyman (modeled on Rockwell himself). Neither colors their gray hair.

The Confederate soldier’s son, being on the losing side, goes West, becomes a fur trapper, and takes a consort, a stout woman of the Hunkpapa Sioux, as explained (at length) in the final chapter of the Coen brothers’ Ballad of Buster Scruggs.

This is probably just a coincidence, of course, but I can also imagine little Joel and Ethan owning a coffee-table book of Rockwell illustrations (my parents had one in the 1970s) and puzzling out every detail in Rockwell’s painting. After all, Rockwell was hugely influential on American filmmakers. The two leading collectors of Rockwell’s works today are Lucas and Spielberg.

2 Generations Ago: The Northern clergy couple’s son is a blue-eyed Fitzgeraldian dandy who marries a stylish flapper.

In contrast, the Western fur trapper’s son is a swarthy half-breed cowboy desperado who marries a blonde saloon girl.

At that point, the branches of the family tree cross over as we reach the boy’s parents.

1 Generation Ago: The boy’s quarter–Native American father, the descendant of the adventurous Western branch of the family who come from the losing side in the Civil War, is dark, unsmiling, and formidably masculine. (It is forgotten that Americans were not particularly racist toward partial American Indian ancestry. For example, Herbert Hoover’s vice president Charles Curtis was famously part American Indian.)

His mother, the descendant of the respectable Northern branch, is fair and sweetly smiling.

The boy himself has inherited his maternal grandfather’s blue eyes and his great-great-great-great-great-grandmother’s red hair.

A few sympathetic comments on the boy’s conception of his family tree.

The basic problem that humans have in thinking about their family trees is that the further back you go, the more exponentially it explodes to an inconceivable size. Your family tree nine generations ago has 512 slots to fill. So you’d have more than 1,000 ancestors in your last nine generations.

Here’s what one looks like that you can buy from Etsy:

Impressive…but unwieldy.

Different cultures have different ways of dealing with this problem of extracting something meaningful-sounding from this colossal entity.

For example, the Chinese traditionally just consider the strict male line of descent.

This allows the Chinese to engage in heroic feats of genealogical recordkeeping. For example, Taiwanese businessman Kung Tsui-chang is acknowledged as a 79th-generation descendant of Confucius.

On the other hand, the Chinese don’t pay attention to female ancestors, who are clearly important, both genetically and culturally.

Similarly, the ancient Hebrews paid close attention to male line ancestry (thus the 42 generations of Begats in the New Testament from Adam to Jesus). But then, after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, rabbinical Jews switched over to Judaism being passed down along the female line.

Rockwell’s American boy, like most Western Europeans, is somewhat more sexually evenhanded, paying attention to his mother’s line, including his gray-haired great-grandmother (who looks like the type who might live long enough to meet her great-grandson). But still, being a boy, he’s biased toward imagining his male ancestors.

His parents, the boy imagines for the sake of simplicity, are third cousins, both being descended from that prosperous top-hatted early-19th-century American businessman whose sons fought brother against brother at Gettysburg so bravely.

Further back, he sees his family tree as single-threaded through the male line until reaching the founding pirate and the princess. Like Cain’s Wife, most of his female ancestors just sort of appear from somewhere.

Rockwell’s version of the average American boy’s conception of his ancestry is insightful. In truth, only a few forefathers were memorable adventurers. Most of his ancestors were forgotten dirt farmers. But still, dirt farmers who survived and propagated are not to be despised.

Accurate thinking about ancestry is harder than most Westerners care to do. As I blogged in 2006:

Genealogists use the term “pedigree collapse” (coined by Robert C. Gunderson) to signify the phenomenon that if you go back enough generations in your family tree, the number of unique individuals is less than the number of slots due to inbreeding so ancestors end up doing double duty as redundant forebears. The number of unique individuals per generation in your family tree forms roughly a diamond shape, expanding for a number of generations into the past, then collapsing the farther back you go.

The term “pedigree collapse” almost never ever comes up in discussions of race because American intellectuals don’t grasp that race should be thought about in genealogical terms, but it’s useful for understanding how racial groups are formed and fade away.

If you go back to ancestors alive 4,000 years ago, say, George W. Bush might indeed be descended by 1 path from n!Xao, a Bushman in the Kalahari, but he’d also be descended from Owen, a farmer in Essex, by 800,000,000 different paths. Add them all up and it’s reasonable to say that George W. Bush is a lot more British than Bushman. Nobody actually doubts that, but when people like Steve Olson start talking about genealogy, they quickly get bogged down in essentially symbolic thinking, in which having one ancestor from ethnic group X is somehow just as important as having many millions from ethnic group Y.

American eugenicists propagated the extreme American bias against inbreeding. British eugenicists couldn’t because their godfather Charles Darwin married his first cousin and was also slightly inbred in his ancestry.

So Americans, who dominate the world’s thinking about race today, refuse to think about the role of endogamy in creating race.