Family.

RESEARCHING your family tree can be a more melancholy exercise than you might think. If your ancestors turn out to be considerably worse than you, that's depressing; or if they turn out to be better, it can be a kind of rebuke. Around the same time I was reading lan Frazier's gently sad history of his family, I was also reading an H. P. Lovecraft story, "Shadow over Innsmouth," about an Ohio WASP who discovers he's descended from evil, fish-headed monster people from outer space. As Mr. Frazier, another Ohio WASP, implicitly and humbly acknowledges, his experience falls more toward the opposite end of the spectrum.

Though raised in Ohio, Mr. Frazier left for Harvard and now lives in New York City, where he writes for The New Yorker. In his present social class, there is a tendency to view Ohioans and other Midwesterners as if they were from outer space. Someday a historian will figure out when our white urban elite began to fear and despise anyone who was white but not urban nor, in their view, elite. James Gardner, NR's art critic, estimates the change happened after World War 11, and offers as one of many historical markers some famous pictures the photographer Robert Frank took in the late Forties and early Fifties: photos of Middle Americans shot in such a way as to make the subjects look as stupid and ugly as possible. A typical image shows a little boy standing next to a huge American flag, wearing dungarees and a moronic expression.

Yet Mr. Frazier, who grew up with people like that boy, escaped the disease endemic to his class. He has now written two books asserting the charm, even the nobility, of his fellow Midwesterners, past and present, but mostly past. Great Plains, published in 1989, was a wonderful account of his travels in the Old West: Kansas, Nebraska, Montana, Oklahoma. No one who reads his new book will doubt his affection for the eastern part of the Midwest, or his pride in the modest part his family played in the life of the region.

Family narrates the history of the Frazier family as it has connected over two hundred years with the Hursh, Wickham, Bachman, and Chapman families, of Ohio and Indiana, to produce a line of genealogical descent leading to the birth of Mr. Frazier (1951) and his four siblings. It's odd today to find somebody writing about his family who isn't the spouse or child of a celebrity, who wasn't abused in any way--who, in fact, loved his parents and says of the death of his younger brother at 17 that it was "the worst thing that ever happened to me."

Mr. Frazier's parents are dead now, too, but they remain very much alive in his mind. He finds himself at one point standing by the edge of an Ohio pond. A flock of geese flies overhead, "dark against the sky, then dim against the trees. When they were over the pond, all the geese stopped beating their wings at exactly the same moment and began to glide. My heart jumped; everyday thoughts fell away and I felt the full weight of how much I loved my mother."

There is a touching familial piety here that makes the beauty of the writing all the more admirable. (The author notes in passing that he writes on a manual typewriter: it shows in a clear, economical prose which, I'm convinced, is connected with the physical effort it takes to strike the keys, and which word processors discourage.) Frazier respects even some long-dead relatives whom today you would expect to be dismissed as embarrassments if not downright villains: a Newport, Rhode Island, merchant with ties to the slave trade, and various Protestants so serious about their practice of Christianity that they refused to travel or read secular literature on Sunday, and among whom a typical diary entry reads, "Arose early this morning. Consecrated myself anew to the Service of Almighty God."

Working from diaries and letters dating back to as early as 1855, Mr. Frazier has produced an affectionate, extremely engaging portrait of what it was like to be an ordinary American a century or two ago. His ancestors came to Ohio after the Revolution, from Connecticut. There, the British had ravished town after town; and so as compensation the new American government allowed for the creation of the "Connecticut Western Reserve" where Ohio would later be, and parceled out land to former colonists who had lost their homes in the war. Mr. Frazier's first family member to make the journey west was Platt Benedict, who with his wife, Sally, moved in 1817 from Danbury, Connecticut, to what would become Norwalk, Ohio, named for Norwalk, Connecticut.

Other relatives fought in the Civil War with the 55th Ohio regiment, experiencing defeat at Chancellorsville and victory at Gettysburg. Mostly, though, they lived unassuming lives.

Of one great-great-grandfather, Mr. Frazier reports that the only piece of writing he was able to discover by the man is the text of a schedule for the Indianapolis & Vincennes Railroad. Its concluding, valedictory words read: "Be sure and get through round-trip tickets when you start, and don't fail to start." The book brims with perfect one- or two-line summations of a whole personality. About Mr. Frazier's grandmother Flora Hursh--whose household labors he catalogues with special attention to baking--he says: "Nothing about the world of today would puzzle her more than the contempt it has worked up for fruitcake."

Family, though, is more than an extended family photo album minus the photos. There is an unmistakable tide in the history of these families, which Frazier notices early on and conveys in a powerful, because personal, way. It's the slow evaporation of noble sentiment, reflected in a wider way in American culture.

In secular life, patriotic sentiment has had an increasingly hard time expressing itself in an elevated form. At the start of the Civil War, Mr. Frazier's relatives automatically enlisted to defend the Union against the treasonous, secessionist Southerners. The fate of patriotic feelings in later generations is succinctly indicated in an encounter Mr. Frazier had as a college student when he bumped into a friend "who told me apologetically that he had just enlisted in the Marines. I could not understand why anybody would do such a thing. The idea of serving my country had not crossed my mind."

Frazier also chronicles what has become of religion, specifically Protestantism, in America. In a Protestant society, given the Protestant denial that we need ancient sources of authority to tell us how to read the Bible, a sign of strong, widespread faith is the proliferation of sects. So, as Mr. Frazier notes in one of many fascinating detours, the story of American religion in the nineteenth century is one of Protestant sects splintering like branches of a family tree: three or four kinds of Methodists, seven kinds of Baptists, eight kinds of Presbyterians, and a wild bramble of sects you've never heard of (some that rejected names altogether) plus Sandemanians, Finneyites, Rappites, Zoarites, Pietists, Dunkards. A number of Mr. Frazier's ancestors belonged to the Disciples of Christ--who split over whether it was a sin to play a foot-pump organ in church, and argued vigorously, if not to the point of schism, over whether the "D" in "Disciples" should be capitalized.

But, among Ian Frazier's WASP forebears, faith weakened. "My ancestors," writes Mr. Frazier, "talked and wrote a lot more about God and Jesus Christ than I do. They prayed out loud, cited Scripture in conversation, and generally gave a strong appearance of belief... They could be a tough audience. In church, they often hummed when they liked what the preacher was saying and sometimes hissed softly when they didn't."

Things began to fall apart, not in the radical 1960s, but in the allegedly solid 1950s. Mr. Frazier's father, his son thinks, chose statistics as a profession because it could explain the world in crisp terms without relying on "the old Calvinist insistence on good and evil, saved and damned." People of that generation wanted a religion that made few demands, a religion "of peace and serenity and noncontroversy and refuge from the world." That type of faith is exceptionally difficult to pass on to your children, with the result that many Protestant children of the 1950s, like Mr. Frazier, later found themselves religiously at loose ends.

Of course this doesn't ultimately explain why Protestantism, or anyway its mainline division, has flickered. Mr. Frazier can't explain it, though he thinks he can. Family includes a penultimate chapter in which he asks, in an elegiac mood, "what became of our faith." He proceeds to drop the voice of the previous three hundred pages--warm, amused, yet melancholy--and recounts a brief history of America from the point of view of the new high-school textbooks the Clinton Administration has been calling for: slavery, Indians, Vietnam, environmental pollution. I can't account for this unexpected wandering into haut cliche. It is the single false, if elongated, note in an otherwise very likable and educational book.