That is what the question says to me as well but some people honestly feel that way about everything and mean it. That idea is completely foreign to me but is a fairly common viewpoint. You see it in everything from politics to personal choices.
I don’t look for famous people in my genealogy research. I don’t even show most of it to other people. I am lucky to have an interesting family history that goes back over 400 years in the U.S. on my paternal side. I have learned a lot of interesting things including why I have ‘James’ as my first name but go by my middle name as all first born males in my family do on the paternal side. No one knew why that it was the family rule when I was born, only that it had to be done. That traditional is over 300 years old. There are lots of things you can learn that are unconscionably passed down through the generations when you study it in depth and the records have never been better.
If you don’t care about history, sociology, or anthropology in general, too bad for you but many of us do. Genealogy is just a personal branch of all of those things. It isn’t Google of Facebook however. It takes research skills and more time than you probably have left on this earth go through it all and make sense of it. I have probably spent several thousand hours so far with more than that left before it is 50% complete. Genealogy research isn’t for casual userrs although you can easily piggyback on a close and responsible family member who has taken the time to do a good job.
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.
Learning about family history is a way to learn about history in general. And, as someone upthread said, it personalizes it.
To know I have an ancestor who was incarcerated at Andersonville, or who was court-martialed during the Revolutionary War, or who fled France after the St. Bartholomew’s Day massacre, somehow makes these events more “real”. “What if it had been me?” I think.
Unfortunately for me it’s insanely difficult to find family history (I’m half black and Mexican). But one thing I do like from the little I know is I like how my family (on the black side) got their last name from their masters in Georgia (my great-grandfather, who I remember, his parents were slaves. Like no shit born into slavery. Crazy) and then were share croppers to, only a few generations later, have a descendant, my brother, who is a professor at a prestigious university.
I love genealogy, my sister doesn’t mind hearing what I find, and my brothers don’t care. I come from poor farmers in different parts of Europe, and that’s what I expected. I just like the information, I like to think about their lives and the struggles they had. My great-great grandparents lost six kids in December of 1853 from what my grandfather had heard was diphtheria. I saw the entries in the church record book, and it was very moving. I just find it all interesting, but it certainly doesn’t bother me if others don’t.
While I am sure that many people share your opinion, I would imagine that people who do not care about their family history are not the people at whom Ancestry.com is targeting their ads.
As someone who cannot get information past two generations on her mother’s side and barely any information whatsoever on her father’s, anybody who makes any kind of inroad into their own genealogy receives praise and a twinge of envy from me.
(To be fair, all my grandparents “came over on the boat” sometimes during the early 1900s. Their records are no doubt collecting dust somewhere in scattered churches. But not to be able to find ANYTHING else about my father other than the fact he lied about his age so he could fight in WWII?!?)
I see your point and agree, and I bet you wouldn’t have to go back too far, before you could find someone in your family related to some kind of European royalty if you looked hard enough.
I recall a TV program in the 70s, and the black guy was looking for his ancestors and thought they’d be slaves and his ancestor was a king. A king who sold other blacks to the white slave traders.
Which again brings home the point, why does it matter?
Though I must confess, I’d be so embarrassed to be related to Hitler.
When I see that commercial and he says his ancestor was born a slave but died “a businessman,” that’s what bothers me more. What kind of businessman? An insurance agent? A furniture salesman? A real estate agent? In genealogy you look at old city record books and census records and it’s not very helpful when you get vague information like that.
Some occupations don’t even exist anymore, but I’d rather learn my great-grandfather was the town lamplighter than just to hear “businessman.” At least it gives me something.
I started my family history research out of mere curiosity and a desire for order - who was born where, when - but I ended up realizing that past events had greatly affected me in ways I hadn’t previously conceived of.
“We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.” - T.S. Eliot
Those brought as slaves to the US, were listed like cattle, no names, numbers and sex only, in most cases. Names were randomly assigned and changed at will. Families were split and sold off.
Don’t you think his initial hesitation could have been that he was about to pay a fee and end up with no helpful information whatsoever. And why shouldn’t he be happily delighted to learn what he did? It’s an inspiring story. Doubly so if you thought all you’d find was made up names and dead ends.
I don’t really like genealogy either, but some of the comments in this thread are weird.
It’s obvious to me that the guy in the commercial was afraid he wouldn’t find anything interesting in his lineage, except constant reminders that his ancestors were lowly slaves. Who would want to spend money to find that out? But instead, he found a story about an ancestor that bucked this expectation and that makes for nice tidbit of information to share at the family reunion. Doesn’t seem that weird to me.
Some people dig this kind of stuff. They like finding out that they are connected to history–that they just didn’t pop up in a vacuum. I hope no one is claiming they wouldn’t feel something if they discovered that their great-grandfather was a signer of the Constitution or a famous scientist or even a fanatic that had burned down an orphanage or something. For people with an interest in genealogy, people are motivated by these kinds of “what ifs”.
I have an older sister who, at one time, was interested in this kind of stuff. She’s a very family-centric person, who likes feeling apart of a big clan and knowing everyone who is half-way related to her. I’m not like this at all, but it’s not like I don’t understand it either.
I suppose that is true if you don’t believe in something as ambiguous as an “identity”. But if you do, genealogy would be as good a place to find it as any other.
I’ve always been a fan of history in general but not until I was in my mid-40s was I ever very interested in genealogy. Once you get into it, it’s a good excuse for digging through lots of old source documents and things of that nature, I’m assuming the kind of things real historians do (but have probably never done with a lot of these documents because they are mostly lacking in historical importance aside from aggregating certain data to view trends over time.)
By the time I got into genealogy, on one side of my immediate family a wealthy great-uncle had paid some professional genealogist in the early 90s to do an exhaustive family tree and it was compiled into a pretty professional looking, leather-bound tome.
Interestingly I think my great uncle was moderately defrauded, because that side of the family is directly linked to Scottish royalty through several prominently known Kings. When I did my own research I never found anything to support the linkage suggested in the more professional tome (by this time the great uncle had since passed and I knew nothing of the individual who was paid to compile it.) But I have always sort of suspected they “spiced up” his family tree because he was a rich old guy who was paying someone money to race their lineage. I don’t know that that’s the case, and because I lacked the patience/resources to truly delve into it, it’s possible they had stuff that proves their tree as being accurate that I never found.
The other side of the family was actually a lot more interesting to me, even though there wasn’t any particularly glamorous person I found. That side of the family was intrinsically difficult. For example until I started doing my own genealogical research I didn’t even know the names of one set of my great-grandparents, because none of the living relatives I had knew them, and because of an estrangement in the family, when the deceased relatives who would have known those great-grandparents were alive none of my living relatives spoke to them in decades and there was just no knowledge at all as to who they were.
I of course knew some of their offspring by name so I was eventually able to find out their names and from there traced back to the late 1700s. But that first link was one of the hardest, because even knowing who my grandfather was and having census records that only got me about halfway there. I found that my grandfather lived in a house with like literally 16 other relatives and several of whom were adults and of the right age to have been his parents. Eventually by pulling together several different newspaper articles I was able to figure out who my great-grandparents were based on stories (one of the key ones was actually story about my grandfather being in some pageant at church, and the article mentioned who his parents were.)
From there I found out who my great-great grandparents were along that branch. One of my great-great grandmothers was married to a man whom she killed. My great-great grandfather married her soon after, and it appears she was charged with murder shortly after that and my great-great grandfather took out an ad in the newspaper soliciting donations to hire an attorney for his wife to defend herself in court (the ad stated they needed help to prove her case of self defense.) I never found anything definitively about a trial or how it ended, but considering children she had over the next few years I don’t see how she could have been convicted since she wouldn’t have been able to continue having children over that time span. That line of my family has several other disreputable stories and I found those a lot more interesting than finding out that some great-great-great-great aunt married a famous political figure of the time late in life (after childbearing age.)
I was actually very surprised when I found out that the last guy from that line of the family to live in England was actually a prominent lawyer in Cornwall as well as being involved in politics. It was out of character for that branch of the family to have anyone like that in it. Then as I was reading some scans of old English newspapers I found an article about how he was wanted because he had been engaged in some sort of large scale counterfeiting scheme. That’s also the same year his name first shows up in Nova Scotia where he apparently had decided to move relatively late in life…
I enjoy genealogy just because this sort of research gives me some personal context for historical events. Closest thing to a claim to fame in my tree is that one of my multi-greats was one of the Hessians captured by Washington after he crossed the Delaware.
Some folks seem to get a little overly obsessed with their forebears IMHO, almost to the point of ancestor worship. Not for me. I am curious about my ancestors’ lives, but none of them are worthy of adulation.
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.
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?
