REVIEWS
THE GENEALOGICAL SUBLIME
JULIA CREET
University of Massachusetts Press, 176 pages, £27.50
Julia Creet’s university profile describes this “crossover academic/trade book” as tracing “the cultural, historical and corporate histories of the longest, largest, and most profitable genealogy databases in the world”.
In it Creet ponders the collision between the “genealogical zeitgeist”, the rise of large-scale databases fed by user-generated content, and her own “profoundly personal” genealogical journey into her origins, coining a new term – the genealogical sublime – to describe the totalising
