On Feminist Genealogy

The tradition of women adopting the surname of their husband is a strange one. In Spanish cultures the custom is far more symmetric. I don't exactly know what it is, but it is roughly that a girl takes the surnames of both her father and mother, and takes that of the mother first. And the boys take both too, but the other way around. So for example, El Che was named Ernesto Rafael Guevara de la Serna, Guevara was his father's surname, and de la Serna was from his mother. But it is recorded that his father's mother's name was Lynch. This is because Lynch, was an Irish grandmother of his. But her surname would have been passed down to all her female descendents, which means that in Spanish speaking countries women have the same 'genealogical continuity' as men.

The tradition of women adopting their husband's married name is a pernicious one. It basically means that in these cultures it is practically impossible for a woman to know her ancestry! Humanity is not a tree, going back to Adam and Eve, it is really one whole river, and within it we can trace two streams. There is a feminine stream and a masculine one. And the feminine stream is the more fundamental one. As I've said before, men and women are different: the mechanics of human Biology are such that women are all practically the same living organism, which exists in many different places at any one time. Men are different, they don't have this physical continuity from father to son because there is a fourteen-year discontinuity between the sperm which fertilises the ovum in the mother and the sperm which will fertilise the ovum in the mother of that woman's grand-daughter. Men are like the flowers on a tree, they serve just to equilibrate the genetic stream. So men are like a distributed data storage facility. They each store up a bit of genetic flexibility and can transmit it from one part of the whole Global Plant to another part.

The male genome has a tiny amount of information compared to the mitochondrial genome of the female. The mitochondrial genome is much more stable. It is through mitochondrial DNA that we can trace migration of human populations over centuries, such as those Jews who became black and wound up living in Masvingo and keeping the ark of the covenant in Zimbabwe!

And the male genetic heritage is often doubtful. Men cannot easily know who are their children, but no woman is likely to give birth without knowing about it! If you want to do a little interesting research project, then look up the life of Frederick, Lord North, and George III, and look up Thackeray's Lectures on the Georges which Dodgson mentions in his "Life and Letters," and read about Sir Isaac Brock, and George IIIs support of Charles Stuart in exile in France.

I personally think the probability that George III was really the son of Frederick Prince of Wales is far less than fifty percent. And so I think that the probability that the English Royal Family are in fact bona fide is far less than fifty percent. That doesn't mean I think they shouldn't be the Royal Family, but I wish people had the courage to discuss this openly. You won't find anyone asking this question on any public forum. Goodness knows why though, because if you actually read around any bit of history a bit you find a lot more questions than you find answers. And note how beautifully polished and well-researched is the Wikipedia page on George III. It couldn't have been done better by an equerry to the Prince of Wales!

Now back to the main point of this e-mail: this uncertainty of the male genetic line, coupled with the fact that in English tradition (or is it wider than that?) the more evident feminine genetic stream is rendered practically untraceable in historical records, means that in reality none of us really knows our true cultural heritage. For example, we imagine we know that the Grants mostly originated from Scotland. But we don't really know that. All we know is that the male line can be traced back to Scotland. What do we know about the mothers of all those men though? Absolutely nothing, they aren't 'real Grants'. Some of them could have been Greek, or Finnish, and some very probably were. That all these different women from different parts of the world all happened to marry male descendents of one old man Grant who lived in Scotland is just a long series of accidents. Or could it be the other way around?

If you want to test this, then try to find the statistics. Who in the English speaking world, has a greater interest in Genealogy, men or women? Do a survey amongst your friends. How many women can trace their feminine ancestry? I recall trying to find out about the Clarkson family. I was interested to know if there was any connection with the anti-slavery campaigner who has lent his name to Clarkson Rd in Cambridge, which is the address of the Cambridge Centre for Mathematical Sciences. I found it almost impossible to make connections amongst the publicly available data. Because I was trying to connect the surname of a male stream with the practically non-existent female stream. I realised later that the coincidence of the surnames is totally irrelevant. "Clarkson," being an English surname, is an essentially masculine phenomenon: it is solely the male genetic line, and has nothing whatsoever to do with the women. I am told the Church of Mormon has one of the biggest genealogical databases in the world. I don't suppose that it is run entirely by Mormon women, but go on, someone surprise me!

Now, by using the Internet, we could reconnect this one river. But it will only work if we all share all our family heritage data. And I mean everyone in the world. This is why no-one should use these proprietary genealogy databases. There is technically no necessity for that: we just need a well designed meta-data catalogue describing the different concrete representations of genealogical data. The basis for this is all laid out in the single most impressive example of systems engineering I have ever come across, which is the OSI's standard called ASN.1 which stands for Abstract Syntax Notation. This is just one example of one application of ASN.1, but there are many, many others covering all types of communication and computation. And the work I have been doing recently is towards a generic system for editing abstract syntax notation.

This cannot be done by any one private company for profit, because it is something that will never be profitable for any particular organization: it will only be profitable for the whole of humanity. That is the unfortunate situational logic we constantly have to fight against: what is good for the whole Earth is never going to be financially profitable for any particular person or group of people. So while capitalism is the fundamental basis of the Global Economy, the future of the Earth, and the whole of humanity, is more than a little doubtful.

Of course, if everyone in the world did share their genealogical data then we would all know with near certainty, who really was the father of George III, and no doubt there would be some other potentially embarrassing paternity conclusions. So I don't think it is entirely an accident that the word Genealogical has ancient Greek roots of Genus and a-logical, which is a privative alpha: it means illogical or incomprehensible, or without reason.