To-day I finished A.J. Jacobs’s It’s All Relative: Adventures Up and Down the World’s Family Tree (2017), the second of my four Powell’s Books acquisitions and the one with the bold blue trade dress. I began reading it less than twenty-four hours ago, right after I finished Between You and Me, so this turned out to be one of those started-reading-and-couldn’t-stop affairs that happens on rare occasions to me.

I found it a very engaging and eminently recommendable read. The prose was laced with bits humorous and endearing. On the thousands of cousins Jacobs was discovering: “These newfound cousins would likely come in all shapes, sizes, and ethnic backgrounds: tall cousins and short cousins, white cousins and black cousins … cilantro-loving cousins and cousins who believe cilantro tastes like Satan’s unwashed tube socks.” On a talk for the Daughters of the American Revolution: “At the end of my talk, the Daughters clap and seemed pleased. Though they probably would have clapped just as much if I’d spent the entire time playing air saxophone to the Star Wars cantina song. They’re just too polite not to. So who knows.” This kind of thing tickles me.

And the content was every bit as satisfying as the jokes. I thought I came into this book with a greater-than-average understanding of genealogy. I knew of mitochondrial Eve and y-chromosomal Adam, pedigree collapse, LUCA, DNA testing revealing nonpaternity events, and what exactly once removed meant in second cousin, once removed. All of this cribbed from various sources over the years—Wikipedia, Wait But Why, reddit, various genealogy enthusiast websites whose URLs probably ended in “.net”. But I’d never seen all these insights collated into one book. And I learned so much more too, and in the context of Jacobs’s vignettes of the various colourful characters in his ancestry, which were plenty entertaining.

This book was also a fascinating study in being an event organiser. After some digging into his vast web of familial interconnections, Jacobs decides to do something preposterous: he’d have one year to put together a Global Family Reunion to beat the Guinness world record of family reunion size*. Many of the chapters end with a field report. “Reunion Countdown: 38 Weeks. It’s been a rough week, speakerwise. Three speakers who had previously agreed to talk have just dropped out. It has me down.”

I like this. Not just because it’s a useful narrative device to keep the book moving, but as someone who spent two years of grad school being the de facto Zoom event organiser for everything in a two-dozen-strong friend-group, I commiserate on a smaller scale.

And the actual event itself, the Global Family Reunion, was a glorious mess. Which is probably a metaphor for the mass of contradictions that make up the human family. “It was a successful failure,” his wife Julie concludes. That’s also how I feel about the survival of that grad-school friend-group, one year down the line.

I think I picked up this book first in Powell’s Books because I remembered I’ve dabbled fleetly in genealogy before. Not the specific genealogy of my own family, just abstract concepts like the Most Recent Common Ancestor (MRCA) or how it’s possible for two people to be simultaneously half-aunts and half-nieces to each other**. Now that I’ve read this book, I’m feeling vaguely on the brink of researching my own family tree. I already know of all of my great-grandparents, and a few of my great-great-grandparents, but that’s it. Should I make my contribution to one of the great collaborative family tree projects that the Internet has empowered?

I’d love to be able to know how I’m related to everybody else (in practice, celebrities and friends, but in principle, everybody else). I know that Asian trees are less complete than European trees, but maybe in contributing my own branch I’d be taking steps to solve this? But also I’m aware of privacy concerns, and how exactly I’m supposed to trust these companies to not sell, or do anything otherwise nefarious with, my data. And I know these privacy concerns affect not just me, but my whole family. Anyone I’d be adding to the tree. I’ll have to bring it up with them first. Maybe at the barbecue reunion next month that I’ve had the quixotic notion of event-planning for.

*Although I gather he’s no stranger to doing preposterous things: he also wrote The Year of Living Biblically (2007), where he spent an entire year doing precisely that, following hundreds of the Bible’s most obscure rules as literally as possible.

**Rest in peace, the webpage where I learned this fact. It was an academic monograph, “Genetic and Quantitative Aspects of Genealogy”, written by one F. M. Lancaster, who, I gather, is quite old. I haven’t visited it in three years, and it now seems to be broken.

Update: it seems to be here now.