Being descended (in some small part) from a R.W. General (Rufus Putnam) I take a little pride in it, but, frankly, not much. Most of my real ancestry is goatropers, hoss-thieves, drunkards, and wife-beaters.
One of the most heart-warming stories I’ve ever read was about a little girl of Chinese ancestry, who was adopted by a U.S. couple. The little girl, for whatever reason, decided she wanted to take up Irish Folk Dancing. There was resistance at first, until everyone suddenly realized: culture is not genetic. She was accepted into Irish dance lessons, got good at it, and even participated in competitions.
People indulge in recreational pursuits that they find satisfying even if the end product is not “important”.
Go ask football fans to justify why it’s important to know which team won this week. Check with the guy doing crosswords to find out how he’s going to change the world with his completed puzzle. No doubt somewhere out there, some guy who spends 15 hours a week staring mindlessly at the tv is opining that genealogy is pointless because what’s it all matter anyway.
If you enjoy doing it, then that’s the point. It’s kind of like crossword puzzles for people who are ok knowing they can’t turn the back page upside down for the answer.
My father used to talk, half jokingly, about our family connection to Grand Duchess Anastasia of Russia, daughter of the last Tsar, who was rumored to have escaped execution (later proven to be just that - a rumor). I think dad wished there was some connection, but when my brother did a detailed family history, no such link emerged. Poor dad.
The research project did provide some interesting information and allowed my parents to make some family connections/reconnections late in life before they both died. My brother’s research only went back as far as when my ancestors arrived in the US from eastern Europe, around 1900, so no data on their whereabouts and activities in the old country.
One of the things that would have interested me is what our ethnic name was (paternal), sinced it was anglicized upon arrival in the US.
There are a couple of other things, too. One is that this is a list of the folks that you’ll be joining in a bit. They lived different lives, but they met the same transition that we all will.
Another is looking at what’s been left behind. What information is there and what’s missing. It makes a person wonder what stories and bits of information are going to be lost if they don’t get them recorded somewhere.
The thing that pushed me into starting a family tree was inheriting the family photos from several different relatives. If I’m actually going to keep these and pass them on, I need to organize and label them. To do that I need to know who the hell these people are. Big hint: label your photos!!!
When you say ancestry, ancestry can mean different things. The ancestry I’m most interested in is not in different countries, it’s right here. It’s collecting names before they’re forgotten and getting older relatives to identify photos. You always get stories along with that. Ancestry.com is a great resource. More important to me, it gives me somewhere to post information so that if, say, none of my kids are interested in old names and stories, but one of my grandkids develops an interest after I’m gone, some of it will be there.
Maintaining a family tree/researching and/or documenting family history is a hobby. You could easily ask a philatelist “what’s the big deal about these stamps” or a numismatist “who cares about a bunch of old coins”.
Maybe its just not your thing. But a site like ancestry.com is selling their product, so obviously they are going to want to make it seem as interesting and/or necessary as possible. Just because its important to some people doesn’t mean it will be or has to be important to you.
Just curiosity.
It was always obvious by my parents’ surnames that I’m German and French, but I also traced one GGGfather to England and I’ve even got photos of him which is cool. In another branch I’ve hit a dead end. I might keep trying, I might not. It’s just something to do.
Yes, it matters to me a lot. Race, ethnic identity, and my genetic heritage are all important components of my identity- our genetics play a very large role in influencing the kind of person we are- so of course I’m interested. I haven’t done the 23 and Me thing yet, but I plan to someday.
It makes a difference to culture. Take music, for example: I like Irish folk music largely because my mother and grandfather do. They in turn got it from their ancestors, and so on back to the old sod. Now, probably if my ancestors had instead come from Slovakia, I would have an appreciation for Slovakian folk music. But they didn’t, and so I don’t.
My stepfather always maintained that he was of French descent, based on his last name. Turns out that although the name is indeed a word in French, it’s purely coincidencidental. His family came from solid Welsh stock. I never got the chance to tell him before he died, though. It’s those sorts of surprises that keep me interested in the hobby.
Like you and nearly every other researcher on the planet, I’ve hit brick walls also. Some I’ve managed to break through, but others will likely remain unbreakable forever.
Interesting, but doesn’t matter (except for health reasons perhaps).
We teach our kids our ancestry, to help make history come alive a bit.
Colonies? We have a book on an ancestor who escaped an Indian raid by hiding in a burnt out tree. Led to the statement in school about “hiding from savages,” but it was easily cleared up.
Revolution? Lets talk about the Hessian who stuck around and married into the family.
Civil War? Mom’s family was Indiana infantry, Dad’s was Indiana cavalry. Add in a few folks on both sides while at it.
World War 1? Great Grandpa spent it in China growing up, his daddy was a missionary.
Add in some Swedes and Danes coming to America to avoid the next war.
Our goal is when the kids study something, to make it matter to them somehow when possible.
At the end of the day, however, I also give them some Heinlein: “This sad little lizard told me that he was a brontosaurus on his mother’s side. I did not laugh; people who boast of ancestry often have little else to sustain them. Humoring them costs nothing and adds to happiness in a world in which happiness is always in short supply.”
My maternal grandfather matters. He was from a town that was sometimes in Poland and sometimes in Belarus, depending on who had won the most recent war. In the early 1900s, he came to this country as more-or-less a peasant. As he earned money, he was able to bring over all of his siblings and his mother. They left a huge extended family behind . . . who, eventually, were all wiped out in the Holocaust. So my grandfather literally saved the lives of the entire family who came here.
Studying my ancestry, and the associated branches, is like a personal history course.
I know I have a seven greats grandfather who was courtmartialed during the Revolutionary War. I have a great-great grandfather who was incarcerated in Andersonville prison, during the American Civil War. Knowing that, and other family stories, makes history more real
I think many Americans want to have some of the “other” in themselves, and feel that they belong to something larger than just being Americans. Knowing what I know of my ancestry has zero practical value to me, but I still enjoy knowing it, and would like to know more.
Although it doesn’t apply to me, I know of at least one circumstance in which one’s ancestry could make a practical difference, though I’m not sure if the law is still in force–namely, the Irish law of guaranteed repatriation for the grandchildren of emigrants.
Ok. As a hobby I understand . I have hobbies that in the grand scheme of things probably are unimportant . I just come upon people that seem to think knowing their ancestry makes them feel somehow superior to someone that doesn’t . They seem to think it is very important . I just don’t see it as terribly important other than the hobby thing .
You love your mother, right? And she loved hers? But only a couple of generations more and you are utterly ignorant: your grandmother’s grandmother is probably not even a name to you, and almost certainly not much more than that.
I am fascinated by the kind of people that both family and history have utterly forgotten.
So far, all of my ancestors are pretty typical in that they fall into larger patterns. But it’s nice to feel a personal connection to those patterns: I exist because my ancestors were a part of this diaspora or that religious nuttery.
Does it matter? No. I find out new information all the time, but it doesn’t change who I am. My grandfather gave me a lot of information, and he was wrong about most of it. But he was half-right about a lot of it, and it’s interesting to see how history gets massaged into legend.
I would love to know something about my fathers side of the family. I don’t know much of anything and ancestry.com doesn’t have anything either. I might actually have some Native American heritage, but don’t have a clue how to find out.
It’s just curiosity. I wonder where my high cheekbones came from.
I’ll let Maeganspopanswer for himself, but I think one of things that puzzles me is the “pride” aspect. In fact, I think I may have opined on a different question than what the OP intended. I totally get the curiosity / history angle but I don’t quite get how people translate their ancestors’ national origin into something they identify themselves as when it hasn’t much to do with anything other than biology, often separated by many generations. It always feels to me like reaching for a way to be, or seem, more interesting.
I never got the chance to tell him before he died, though. 
It’s those sorts of surprises that keep me interested in the hobby.