I’ve done some genealogical research, not much, just back a few generations where the information was readily available. I’ve done 23 And Me for what that’s worth. The thing is I’m not sure why I care. I got much more out of a conversation with my aunt about my deceased mother’s early life than I get out of knowing when my great-grandfather migrated from Germany or whether I am related to the folks in California and Utah with the same unusual last name. Nevertheless, I am sometimes needled with curiosity about those kinds of questions.
So, to re-ask the thread title, how much do you care about those things, and do you understand why? Have you found out anything that altered your perceptions of people you have actually known?
I think it’s interesting how one can inherit quirks.
My mom showed me two photos. One of my Grandfather who died before I was born, and one of me. We both have the exact same standing posture with a proclivity of sticking our thumbs in our belt loops or pockets. Which I found extremely fascinating.
The most interesting aspect to me about what I know about my ancestors is the sheer randomness of the chain of events that led to me being born with the set of genes that I have.
In the 1820s, a German relative of my direct ancestor moved to the vicinity of Baltimore, Maryland and began farming. In the 1860s, my great-great-grandfather, the first guy’s great-nephew, arrived in Richmond, Virginia and then made his way to Baltimore. I don’t know if he made that move because he had relatives in Baltimore, but it seems likely. The Civil War may have had something to do with it as well.
In the 1840s, the families that produced my maternal grandparents fled the potato famine in Ireland and moved to Baltimore, settling in the same neighborhood in south Baltimore.
In the late 1890s, a Polish family with an infant daughter moved from Poland to Baltimore. The infant grew up to marry my German-American grandfather.
My father, in 1942, instead of graduating from high school, going to work in a factory, and getting married by the time he was twenty like most guys from his neighborhood did before the war interrupted things, went to war and didn’t come home until 1945. He didn’t meet my mother until 1948, and I was born in 1954.
Most people’s birth’s are the result of an endless string of random events, I know. But just reading over the origins, travels, and randomness in my particular set of ancestors fills me with awe and wonder.
I’ve traced my family tree up through my mom’s grandparents who came from Slovakia to Pennsylvania then Cleveland. I think it’s very, very interesting to think about these people and what life was like for them in Slovakia (or, at that time, the Austro-Hungarian Empire), and learn why they may have come to the US, and particularly here to Cleveland.
I like to participate in local Slovak and Slavic culture, because my ancestors brought that culture here to Cleveland along with a lot of other Slavs. I like to see how “our” traditions differ from other cultural traditions that came to America. Then I get wrapped up in learning those traditions and I try to practice them myself, because I don’t want them to die.
I like to think about what it would be like if my family didn’t move here, and if I was a modern Slovak. I follow the r/Slovakia SubReddit just to see what is up over there (sadly, it’s a super crazy language so I’ve never been able to grasp it and half the posts are in Slovak).
I’ve traced my dad’s family back to the Czech Republic and Germany. The same generation (his grandparents) came over as my mom’s family. It’s interesting too but the two 25% ancestries aren’t as interesting as my 50% ancestry on mom’s side. I do like to explore what they were doing in Cleveland as well, but I don’t celebrate my Czech and German heritage as much at all.
Anyway…it’s interesting, and educational, I guess.
I got an Ancestry kit for Christmas; still waiting on results.
I’m mildly interested in the outcome, because I really have no more idea about my heritage than vague claims that Mom believes we’re Scotch-Irish, or she thinks my dad’s parents came from Germany, or she heard we have some Indian blood (I could be related to Elizabeth Warren!) My uncle is a bit more into genealogy, but the most exciting thing I learned so far was that my grandfather was born close to where I live now.
So I think it will be nice to have more of a sense of identity.
Close relatives will share traits but, with a relation more distant than 1st cousin, any similarity is probably coincidence. It still seems vaguely nifty that I’m Brad Pitt’s 6th cousin, but I didn’t expect to get invited to his wedding!
For me tracing my pedigree is just a harmless hobby, with similarities both to coin-collecting and working jigsaw puzzles, and — just like those hobbies — with no real utility. It does help trigger an interest in history. (My ancestor was banished to America after the Monmouth Rebellion, and so on.)
I haven’t done a lot of research – much of our family history’s hard to get at due to various wars in the areas we come from; while AIUI the net’s made such things easier it’s still not high enough on my list to get done. But I find information about the missing bits of lives of family members fascinating, when I do come across some.
Maybe it’s because I’m part of the outcome of those lives? If any of those people hadn’t lived, or had lived even slightly differently, I wouldn’t be here. Maybe some of it’s that most of them would have been glad to know (and some of them did know) that descendents, including me, exist? – and so in both those senses I’m sort of a continuance of their lives, and in some sense our lives are part of each others’ lives. For some of those people, especially women whose thoughts, skills, and even names were not recorded, the existence of their descendents is about all the evidence we’ve got left of those lives.
But I wonder whether the overall phenomenon of such interest is related to the need for members of a social species to know who’s related to whom, partly for purposes of mating to limit inbreeding, partly for purposes of trust (though in practice a close relative may be untrustworthy and a stranger might be a person who can be trusted.)
I think my ancestry is interesting, but it doesn’t really matter much. None of us can control the family we were born into, but we can control what sort of person we are now.
I’ve never been very curious about it, but we have a few amateur researchers in the family who’ve tracked this stuff. I did find out a strange pair of coincidences from their work. I’ll refrain from saying any names, since I value a little anonymity here.
One of my relatives committed a very well known killing. Trust me you’ve heard about it. In fact, when meeting new folk I occasionally get some version of “I bet you’re a good shot, right?”
Another relative was a victim of a very well known serial killer. You’ve heard of him (the killer) too.
In addition to the above coincidences, I found out about another one several years ago. I enjoy the music of a certain popular artist (has quite a few number one hits) and was playing it in the truck on a trip somewhere. My wife (who’d been married to me over *15 years *at this point) says: “You know that’s my cousin, right?” I’m slack-jawed and stammer something about the name being the same but spelled different. But nope, it’s really her cousin, he changed the spelling a bit, and they’re even having a ceremony over him in her hometown that weekend. And she didn’t think it was really that important. I remember asking her at what point she decided to reveal this – how many recordings and CDs did I need to accumulate before she thought I might want to know this little nugget?
I can’t get interested in it. I don’t hold myself accountable for the sins of my ancestors, and I don’t hold myself entitled to credit from their deeds. I’m just me, and that starts and ends my self-identity. I am much more interested in who around me shares my interests, and who would undermine those interests. I have between one and two dozen living relatives, four (my three offspring and my brother) I would consider allies. The rest I’ve not seen in over twenty years, and I really have no idea who is dead and alive. I actually have more non-blood allies. This is what is important to me–to know who will have my back, and whose I will have. I believe tradition is worship of ashes, and that it is inappropriate to defer recognition of blessings for an arbitrary calendar day. So no, I don’t give one hot damn about my ancestors. Just my posterity.
I wasn’t interested in the Civil war until I learned my 3xg granddad fought for the union. Same with the War of 1812 until I found two 4xg ancestors who fought in it. I studied the Revolutionary war with actual interest only when I found out a 5xg forefather actually fought at Bunker Hill. And I didn’t really get educated about the Salem Witch Trials until I discovered my 9xg granny was hung for witchcraft there.
So for me, collecting deal relatives sparks my interest in both local and larger historical events.
I wasn’t interested in the Civil war until I learned my 3xg granddad fought for the union. Same with the War of 1812 until I found two 4xg ancestors who fought in it. I studied the Revolutionary war with actual interest only when I found out a 5xg forefather actually fought at Bunker Hill. And I didn’t really get educated about the Salem Witch Trials until I discovered my 9xg granny was hung for witchcraft there.
So for me, collecting deal relatives sparks my interest in both local and larger historical events.
I’ve never been that interested in my ancestry until recently, when I decided to take advantage of a deal from Ancestry-DNA. My maternal ancestry is pretty well documented; my grandfather was born in the US shortly after his parents emigrated from Italy (actually Sicily, as I found out) and my grandmother was Irish, also of recent emigration. There are plenty of pictures and memorabilia from that side of the family.
My father’s ancestry is the puzzle. His father was born in Berlin in 1879 and emigrated in 1901; I never knew him because he died when I was a year old. My grandmother died before I was born, and we always thought she was German but it looks like the town where she was born was actually in Poland. Unfortunately, my father and his siblings never knew (or at least never talked about) their parents’ background, which makes trying to locate records more difficult.
I suspect mine were all human until you go back pretty damn far.
I actually know a lot, my dad being a family history buff. At the same time, charting what is known really highlights how much more we don’t know. The chart makes this expanding fan when you look back – four grandparents, eight great grands, sixteen of their parents, etc. Some of these threads have been traced back to the late 1500s but on the fan those little threads are surrounded by huge empty areas of not knowing / unknown ancestors here and here and here and here, etc.
I have some slaveowners, a few thieves and murderers and attempted-murderers, a man, father-in-law and son who married three sibling sisters, a smattering of soldiers farmers police officers and cabinet makers. Someone up-family married a black partner and was politely ignored henceforth but I haven’t established specifically who. Had a great-great-great grandma who used to call out “Yonder comes yore stringy-haired whore” to her son when his girlfriend was approaching the farmstead, which prompted them to move out on their own. There’s an alleged native american married into the family also. Some adoptions that may have been a different relative’s unplanned and awkward pregnancy transplanted. Some nonadoptions of that same nature.
Mostly Scottish, English, Welch, sprinkles with German and other random European.
My interest in my ancestors extends back to the point that they set foot in the New World. Where they lived, who they were, and what they did before that, I couldn’t care less about.
Unfortunately, this hasn’t saved me a lot of time, as preliminary evidence finds that some of my ancestors go back to Massachusetts ca. 1630.
I wasn’t interested in the Civil war until I learned my 3xg granddad fought for the union. Same with the War of 1812 until I found two 4xg ancestors who fought in it. I studied the Revolutionary war with actual interest only when I found out a 5xg forefather actually fought at Bunker Hill. And I didn’t really get educated about the Salem Witch Trials until I discovered my 9xg granny was hung for witchcraft there.
So for me, collecting deal relatives sparks my interest in both local and larger historical events.
To a certain extent, the story of who our ancestors were is part of the story of who we are. That is, the decisions they made (to migrate or not, to have children by this person or that) led to us being born in the circumstances in which we were born. As the focus moves to more immediate generations, we know more details. But it makes sense that “Who Am I?” extends back through "Who are my parents? and “Who are my parent’s parents?” to distant generations. In a sense, all our ancestry comes down to a single point: us.