Since Alex Haley’s influential 1976 novel Roots, America has seen the rise of a genealogical industry. Western Europe would later start to pick up on the frenzy, with TV shows such as the Dutch Spoorloos, and the BBC’s Who do you think you are?, and particularly with the booming of DNA tests in the 21st century. Simultaneously, the value of ancestors and biological lineage has been accentuated from a different perspective. Stimulated by critical black studies, indigenous studies, and adoption studies, these voices bring to the fore the trauma and impact of forcefully broken (biological) family ties under colonialism, slavery, and international adoption.

Biological descent, lineage, and family trees are quite ambiguous issues. They also carry connotations of biological determinism, racism, and patriarchy. How can racial notions of biological descendance or nationalist belonging, and patriarchal foundations of lineage be critically distinguished from the longing for reparation after separations from ancestors, family, or parents? And, in the case of LHBTQI histories, how have symbolic ancestors done the work of rooting identities in the past in the absence of biological lineage? In sum: What kind of relationships with the past are sought for, and which ones are neglected or excluded?