Not really, no. I do care about relatives I knew well as a child or teenager but mostly haven’t seen in thirty+ years( almost all of my immediate aunts, uncles and first cousins basically ). But those are people I have good memories of from childhood and even then my connection is attenuated because I haven’t seen them for decades. They’re all East Coasters and we don’t visit much or connect on social media.
I have a large slew of second cousins and the like and I’ve met a few once or twice. But for the most part they’re not on my radar or in my thoughts. People I’ve never met at all get next to no thought. What mild interest I have in genealogy is mostly academic.
E.g., I talking to a relative a couple months ago. Family history questions by someone else came up and suggested that the someone get in touch with a 2nd cousin of mine. Turns out, the 2nd cousin had died. I had only communicated a bit via email back when, but still it was sad to learn. Same age as me.
The only great aunt I knew, and then only a tiny bit as a kid, was long part of family lore for various reasons. Heard about her from time to time. Her passing was also a sad moment. She was the last of my grandparents’ generation that I knew when she died.
I’ve made a few overtures to some, but the response was always lukewarm, so I’ve given up on it. The main reason for the contact was to offer/obtain genealogy information.
this is my family in a nutshell… last time anyone had a reunion they city made them rent the park because we filled it up …
90 percent on my 200 + member family lives in 4 areas of the country and I’ve lived in each area and if I wanna say hey i just go on my Facebook page … bt grandma and her relatives done this like 30 years ago the old fashioned way and some of the others have done ancestry…
The only thing I would love to find out is if the girl I’ve heard of is either my older cousin or older sister is really either …
On the one hand, I don’t care about who my relatives are or were.
Here in China, DNA ancestry testing is ludicrously cheap, but I just don’t care. My ancestors were good, bad, lived in this country or that, what difference does it make to me? I’m not the kind of person to hang my identity on my so-and-so heritage.
On the other hand, I’m on board for seeing relatives, though I resented it as a child. The way I see it now, it’s just socializing with the kind of people I might not otherwise meet very often; the elderly, children without society assuming you’re a pedo, etc etc.
I’m down to a handful of cousins scattered around, a disabled brother living here (of course) and a well-off brother 2000 miles away. All the good people have long ago moved out of this snow country, or retired, are ill or have died, are traveling, got their own lives and families. We have basically no one. I care very much for my far-away relatives and keep in touch on Facebook, but only see them at weddings and funerals, if that. I don’t know if I would even go to their funerals when they die (I would for my brother, of course). I don’t expect them at mine (not that I’m having one, there is no one here to give me one.)…Mr. Salinqmind’s family is pretty much dead, end of the line for the Salinqminds. He does has a couple of cousins and we don’t even get Christmas cards from them any more. (they are very peculiar humorless people who never talked much)… My brother once called me and said he’d been up to Canada to visit the cousins, and I said, ‘WHAT cousins???’ There was an offshoot of our family, I have no idea how we were related, but he found them…Funny thing is, I grew up in a village with parents, 8 aunts and uncles, and a dozen cousins at least all within walking distance. Today, they are all gone except for a a handful, I see them on FB. I miss one or two but trying to reconnect? It’s like, ‘what do YOU want?’ - they’re polite, better to chat with them at the next funeral.
I never lived in the same city as any of my extended family growing up. So we would see our first cousins maybe once every 2-3 years. I am in my mid forties and, other than on facebook, I have not seen any of my cousins or aunts/uncles in a decade. I honestly don’t really care about any of them.
I live in Southern California, so I would probably be annoyed if one of them reached out to me now. They would probably want to stay at my house so that they can visit Disneyland.
My mom recently was contacted by a never-known half sister who found her and her other siblings through some kind of DNA thing. This woman was able to tell her stories about her father during a different time of his life than when he was around my mom.
That’s kinda cool. If I had not-known relatives out there who had some shared experience of a relative that we both know in common, I would care about that.
My family is very small; all my cousins are distant and most of them are in the former Jugoslavia. I am not in contact with anyone from my extended family.
In the 1980s, two distant relatives on my dad’s side of the family were found dead under suspicious circumstances, and in the end, it turned out to be either carbon monoxide or hypothermia. (Giving further details could potentially identify them, so I won’t.) They were elderly siblings who always lived together and were probably mildly mentally disabled, and they also had the same last name as me and were from that general region so it didn’t take much figuring out to know we were related. The last time my dad had seen or heard about them was at his grandmother’s funeral in the 1940s, and he was very surprised that they lived as long as they did.
Several people asked if we were related, and I replied, “Yes, and I’m not going to discuss it further” and didn’t.
No, not in the slightest. No interest in family history or anyone outside of my immediate familt. No interest in DNA analysis or any sort of geneology. No matter what I could find out about my religious, cultural or ethnic history it makes no difference to me as a person.
I love my close family and we get on great when we infrequently meet but that’s it.
I’m more interested in my former neighbors and schoolmates than I am in my blood relatives who I would see every 3-4 years or so.
My parents were friends with a couple who were also far away from family, so we would always get together with them for the holidays. That couple divorced, he died, etc. My parents now have at least one holiday a year with the daughter of that couple. My parents are basically the only family on her side. I don’t mind sharing.
I have contact only with my sister and a cousin, whose parents I was very close to but sadly are gone. I had a raft of first cousins and first cousins once removed on my mother’s side and there were annual family reunions which were fun. But since moving away I have lost contact with all of them and I have no real interest in finding them again.
I distant cousin has compiled a five generation genealogical tree of my maternal grandmother’s family and I discovered a fifth who was a good friend in college, but I am not sure I want to try to reconnect with him. And there are literally hundreds of relatives on that tree I never met and I have 0 interest in meeting them.
I had two long-lost cousins that our family had totally lost contact with when their mother divorced my uncle, married a physicist, and moved (she said) to Texas (Los Alamos, as it turned out, to work on the bomb). I was able to give the genealogist her maiden name and he tracked them down by cold calling people with that name at random all over the country. It turned out that one of the cousins had died falling off a mountain in Peru about 50 years ago.
no, I am not interested in meeting more relatives or in the ones I see in frequently. I have something like 22 first cousins (including the dead ones) and two or three times that number of first cousins once removed and twice removed. The number is simply too great to care about.
This has sometimes caused friction between me and my sisters, who think I should love all cousins equally as if they were only slightly inferior siblings. My Dad, before his death, shared this attitude. None of them could except my complete disinterest in attending family reunions or the fact that I have two or three first cousins I actually like, one I actively dislike, and the rest I am completely neutral about.
It occurs to me that people who don’t come from large families may be more interested in meeting relatives than me. Take my stepdaughter (A courtesy title, though I do love her as if she were blood), Cinderella the Rhymer. she fully embraces all the cousins she has no genetic relationship to and loves meeting more because she essentially grew up as an only child with a shit father and unreliable stepfather (the latter being me).