genealogy – book review
“Futureface: a family mystery, an epic quest and the secret to belonging”
by Alex Wagner
New York: One World, an imprint of Random House; 2018.
This is an interesting read – for any level of genealogy afficianado – by noted television news journalist Alex Wagner. Her mother born in Burma, her father’s ancestors from Luxembourg and Ireland, Wagner describes her foray into her family’s genealogy. After conducting some interviews with family members, she continues her research using online resources. She later visits sites of her ancestors’ homelands and consults professional archivists.
She eventually decides to try out DNA testing in an attempt to get more answers to the mysteries she has identified during her research. She clearly describes the process, comparing and contrasting DNA tests from three major distributors (AncestryDNA, 23andMe, and Family Tree DNA). She is surprised to learn of varying results, and contacts each company to explain the process by which each identifies the percentages of origin.
After Wagner’s long “search for belonging” – the search for “her people,” – she concludes (in the last paragraph of her book), “I had been looking in all the wrong places for the string that connected us …” Are we defined by our blood, our ancestry, our ethnic group, the color of our skin, our religious affiliations, ever-changing borders – us and them?
After examining the past, she looks forward. A child and grandchild of imigrants, she has now created her own family. She sees herself as “futureface’ – a name (and the title of her book) she identified with after seeing the cover of Time magazine’s special issue of Nov. 18, 1993, with the title of “The New Face of America.”
And following her quest for “the truth,” she
starts to wonder – does it really matter?
Beth Hurd 