Microwunderkammer

 Parental Artifact #13–a 1901 Atlas that belonged to a great-grandparent (1)

Honestly, I did not know this even existed before we got to the stage of divvying up my parents’ material possessions. Neither of my brothers wanted it. Flipping through it, I observed a note in red pencil on the map of Mexico, pointing at central Michoacán, identifying “Lime production centers.” I figured the book had to have belonged to my great-grandfather. A glance at the inside cover confirmed his ownership.

H. J. Webber was a horticulturalist whose career was largely dedicated to subtropical fruits and who literally wrote the book on citrus (2). Dr. Webber had a full and rich life, doing much for the citrus and avocado industries in California, and rising to such a level of prominence in his field that there is a building named after him on the campus of the University of California, Riverside. Interestingly, he is the person responsible for bringing the word “clone” into the English language in 1903. He needed a word to accurately describe a population that was genetically identical, like a grove of trees that were all grafts from a single parent, so he borrowed the Greek word for “twig,” and published a note in the journal Science (3). He died well before his word found new life in the era of DNA technology.

I don’t know where Dr. Webber lived when he bought this book, but I am pretty sure that he was busy with his career in horticulture. For most of his professional life, he was focused on the importance of germ plasm, collecting, breeding, and improving new cultivars from places near and remote. It amuses me to look through the pages of this atlas, from three generations and a hundred twenty years’ remove, and see where my germ plasm was at that time. Perhaps I have inherited from Dr. Webber a tendency to think too much about population genetics: when I see V’s of geese migrating up and down the western flyway, I see strings of chromosomes, the ebb and flow of the genes that make up a population. I see much the same thing when genetic material from our farm ends up in Australia or Canada or Britain. When I thumb through these pages, I think of the genes that have made me, migrating all over the globe, and weirdly getting together in Southern California.

Biologist me sees the migration of genes; humanist me sees the history of individuals, of interesting people who filled the branches of my family tree (an apt term, given the number of horticulturalists in my ancestry on both sides!). Looking at these pages, it is fascinating to see some of the conditions my people came from—how large or small the towns, under what crown or polity they lived—and how towns have matured to cities and regimes have changed and changed again in that time. So, here are a few pages from this atlas.

San Diego, where my X chromosome comes from, was a lot smaller, and already focused seaward—a great-grandparent worked there for the port. Coming from SoCal, I’m kind of amused by how un-sprawling this view of San Diego is, and can’t help but think about real estate.

Saint Louis is where the original owner of this tome may have resided at the time of its purchase. 1901 saw him finish a doctorate at Washington University, and rejoin the USDA, for which he worked before and after getting his degree. In the surrounding five years he also could be found at research stations in Florida, Washington DC, New York, and Nebraska.

In 1901 some of my genes were in the rough and ready town of Dawson, Yukon Territory, barely a dot on this map, near the Alaska border. A few years before the printing of this atlas, the town boasted over 15,000 residents; the gold that attracted them all had mostly been extracted by 1901 and the town’s population had plummeted, but one of my grandparents stayed long enough to to be half of the first graduating class of Dawson High School.

My Y chromosome comes from an atlas page too much in the news of late, and acquiring yet another layer in a thick sedimentary record of tragedy. The mad dictator that has caused the most recent suffering is, by his own account, inspired by this map, which obliterates almost a dozen sovereign nations and subsumes them all in the Russian Empire. The source town is not shown, but is in the Mohilev [currently Mogilev] Oblast in “West Russia” [currently Belarus].

There are a lot of stories about how those genes migrated and recombined on their way to Southern California, driven by careers, marriages, jobs, itchy feet, and a legitimate fear of death. But there they ended up, and now they are distributed between Los Angeles and Roseburg. For better or worse, it’s likely the end of the line for these particular combinations.

Recently, I was in a vast antique store in Eau Claire, Wisconsin. It had a huge collection of old prints, lithos, engravings, and other papers suitable for framing. Amid the stacks of “Birds” and “Portraits” and “Posters” were drawers of maps, by region. I was amused to see many pages from another edition of this very atlas there, for sale as individual prints. I suppose they are suitable for framing, which would no doubt give Mr. Cram a deal of pride.

If you’d like to see what an American cartographer made of where your germ plasm was in 1901, please: let me know—I’ll try to get a picture of the map and post it here or send it to you. You may find it amusing.

References

(1) Cram, G.F (1901). Cram’s Superior Atlas of the World. George F. Cram, New York.

(2) Webber, H.J. [ed] et al, (1943) The Citrus Industry. University of California Press, Berkeley.

(3) Webber, H.J. (1903). New Horticultural and Agricultural Terms. Science 18 (459), 501-3.