One thing I love about genealogy is the Butterfly Effect aspect. It’s amazing the circumstances, both major and minor, that led to your particular genetic sequence, particularly for Americans. The ethnic cleansing of Ireland by James I & VI and again by Cromwell*, an unfair tax on linen that made several of my ancestors leave northern Ireland, support of James Stuart (King James III & VIII to his supporters, The Old Pretender to his [victorious] non-supporters) that also made a few leave Ireland and Scotland, friction between Scots-Irish settlers and German settlers in Bucks County Pennsylvania, a volcano in Indonesia, a charismatic incompetent Huguenot who somehow managed to convince a few hundred Swiss Protestants that the swamps of (what is now) Jasper County, SC could sustain the same agriculture as the Canton of Neuchatel,
an early 18th century assignation between a white indentured woman and a black man, the Creek Wars of 1812-1814 in Alabama, a recently landless house builder finding employment in the commissioning of a new city to serve as a major harbor and western capital of Georgia, the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, an ambitious black man so eager to build a school that would rival Tuskegee he paid “too good to refuse” prices for land surrounding it, etc. etc., and ultimately my four grandparents came into being when and where they did.
My paternal grandparents really never should have met: he was a small farmer and prison guard among other things who had the ability to read but rarely exercised it, while she was an upper-middle-class college student who wanted to be either a doctor or a physiology professor but whose education got derailed by the blatant sexism in the 1920s university systems of Alabama, thus she ended up teaching in a small rural school and marrying the son of the woman she boarded with and having my father. My mother was conceived because after years of spending 5 and 6 nights per week away from home and getting what jollies he got at railroad stops between Mobile and Cincinatti my grandfather was laid off due to the Depression and basically told the wife he slept near but not with (she didn’t want more children after her 3rd was born and basically told him “do what you want on the railroad, when you’re home you sleep in the bed on that side of the room”); after spending a few months at home and celibate he basically told her “We need to either renegotiate or you need to look the other way when I start visiting neighbor ladies”, and she found the notions of his philandering locally more unbearable than closing her eyes and thinking of Clark Gable for a few minutes once a week or so, and then got pregnant at the advance aged of 33. (She later said “Who knew I could still get pregnant at that age?” and that my mother was a “change of life baby” that my mother was grown before she even thought about the fact that “33 isn’t now and never has been old for childbirth” or that half the women my grandmother knew back in the land before birth control had children when they were that age or older- my grandfather’s mother was in production until she was 46.)
Anyway, it’s just really interesting to me how historical events, including some you never even hear about, can completely change the course of a family’s trajectory and cause them to move to places/marry or reproduce with people/take up trades/rise or fall in their fortunes/etc. in ways that would have been unfathomable to them a generation before. Tracing family lines over the long haul you’ll see some go from riches to rags or vice versa two or three times over the course of a few generations, or make radical changes in their religion or appearance. Really interesting, like seeing a microcosm of the entire human journey.
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Ancestry.com is awesome in case somebody didn’t know that. You can find lost relatives (done), family secrets of living people (done), and other things you can’t hope for in any other single place. The records they have are amazing and they add new ones all the time.
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Ancestry.com is to genealogy sites what Facebook is to social networking. There’s just no competition; other genealogy sites, free or pay, are way less competition to Ancestry than MySpace is to Facebook. Lexis Nexus was talking about getting into genealogy a while back since, like Ancestry, they digitize government documents by the ton and figured they could digitize the Census records and market to another base, but they evidently decided against it. I’m really surprised Google doesn’t do more for genealogists as I think, especially if they did a nominal charge, they have the resources to be the first serious threat.
I know that Ancestry.com, whose owners are Mormon, had some kind of falling out with the LDS church a few years ago over record access, but I’m not sure what it was about. Does anybody know?
