Provenance and the Pedigree: Victor McKusick's Fieldwork with the Old Order Amish

Provenance is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as the record of the "ultimate derivation and passage of an item through its various owners." The term is most commonly used to describe the history or pedigree of a painting—who has owned it, its value at various stages—but it also has a meaning in silviculture, in which it refers explicitly to genetic stock. Provenance, for forestry professionals, is the record of where a seed was taken and of a character of the "mother trees." In this essay I explore provenance in both sense, as a textual record of the origins of a given object (in this case a blood or tissue sample) and as a record of genetic stock. I focus on fieldwork, which creates a record of origins that can certify the authenticity and reliability of a particular pedigree, which then can acquire status as a form of scientific evidence.