Roots, ancestors, DNA: what are we looking for?

Since Alex Haley’s influential 1976 novel Roots, the United States has seen the rise of a genealogical industry. Western Europe later picked up on the trend, with television programmes such as the Dutch Spoorloos and the BBC’s Who Do You Think You Are?, and, above all, with the boom in DNA testing in the twenty-first century. At the same time, the value placed on ancestors and biological lineage has been challenged from another angle. Drawing on critical Black studies, Indigenous studies, and adoption studies, these voices bring to light the trauma and impact of family ties forcibly broken under colonialism, slavery, and international adoption.

Biological descent, lineage, and family trees are far from straightforward. They also carry connotations of biological determinism, racism, and patriarchy. How can racial notions of biological descent or nationalist belonging, and the patriarchal foundations of lineage, be critically distinguished from the longing for reparation after separation from ancestors, family, or parents? And, in the case of LGBTQI+ histories, how have symbolic ancestors done the work of rooting identities in the past in the absence of biological lineage? In short: what kind of relationships with the past are sought, and which are neglected or excluded?

Francesca Morgan teaches U.S. history at Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago. Her publications include her 2021 book on American genealogy’s political dimensions, A Nation of Descendants, and her earlier monograph on hereditary organisations, Women and Patriotism in Jim Crow America (2005).

Chiara Candaele is a postdoctoral researcher at NL-Lab, KNAW. She specialises in the historical intersections of children and colonialism. She wrote her PhD dissertation on the history of transnational adoption in postcolonial Belgium and is currently researching institutional childcare in the Dutch East Indies/Indonesia (1800–1980).

Ayşenur Korkmaz received her PhD from the University of Amsterdam. Her research focuses on the afterlives of the Armenian genocide, touching on mass violence, genealogy, and heritage studies. Korkmaz currently works at the Meertens Institute on an ERC-funded project, focusing on Turkey’s immersive heritage spaces and the political imaginaries of neo-Ottomanism.

Marijke Huisman is Assistant Professor of Public History in the Department of History at Utrecht University, with an interest in emancipatory uses of the past. She recently published Queer geschiedenis van Nederland. De strijd om een eigen verleden (A Queer History of the Netherlands: The Struggle around a History of Their Own) (2026).

Geertje Mak (moderator) is Professor of Gender History and Senior Researcher at the University of Amsterdam, NL-Lab, and KNAW.

In collaboration with the UvA Faculty of Humanities.

This public debate follows on from the NIAS workshop (Healing) Broken Lineages, held earlier that day.