How much do you care who your ancestors were, and why?

In My Humble Opinion
41

Agreed with all of this. I don’t actually care, exactly, about my ancestry. I saw a show recently where a man was trying to clear the name of his great-great-uncle who’d been accused of murder and seemed genuinely upset when it turned out that the conviction was likely justified. That’s not how I feel at all. It’s just that I like history, and researching your personal history is an interesting way of learning more. You get to know more about ordinary people; what was interesting to me was how little my family moved (I’ve only really researched my father’s side).

So I genuinely find it interesting that I am literally walking streets that ancestors of mine from 500 years ago walked - I live about 300m from the last known home of my longest-distant named ancestor - people I can put names to, so know it’s not just likely that they walked these streets, but I know it for certain. 500 years of non-movement is not as exotic as being adventurous and travelling across the world, but in a city where everyone assumes there’s a lot of movement in and out, it’s interesting to discover that, for a lot of working class people, that wasn’t true in the slightest.

It does give me a sort of feeling of connection to the place I live. Those big trees, there, that we walk in the shade of, my great-great-great-grandparents walked past when they were saplings.

But if it had turned out that my ancestors had come from all over I’d have liked that too and would have learned more that way as well.

42

I’m certainly interested in my family history and my ethnic roots. I know a great deal about my background on both sides of my family (ironically, it was my mother who told me much of what I know about my father’s ancestors. Let’s just say that my father is a man of few words). I grew up in Canada but was born in Belgrade, the capital of Serbia and the former Jugoslavia. All my known ancestors would be ethnic Serbs, but not all of them lived in Serbia proper; I have a lot of ancestry in Herzegovina (part of modern Bosnia-Herzegovina) and in modern Montenegro (but not, to my knowledge, of people who would self-identify as “Montenegrin”. Serbs travelled around a lot in the past to escape their Turkish overlords and that family line also hails from Herzegovina. My paternal grandfather was born somewhere around 1912 as an Austrian citizen as that part of Montenegro was part of an Austrian crownland, I think Dalmatia, back then, so would have been a subject of the Emperor Franz Josef). Quite a few of my cousins (all distant - my family is not large), however, are decidedly of mixed ancestry in comparison. I think I have a cousin who is part Macedonian; some of my cousins who also immigrated to Canada are part Croatian and I think part Bosnian; another cousin is half British and I believe one quarter of a line of Jewish extraction that has ties to Romania and South Africa. Which brings me to what I would really be interested in finding out one day. Who else am I related to around the world? I have not made this a priority, but one day I would really like to open an account on ancestry.com or a similar website. I wonder if I would end up connecting to someone who I didn’t know I was related to?

Also, it would really be interesting to do one of those DNA tests and see if any boodlines apart from “Serbian” could be found. It would not make any difference to my everyday life, but would simply be fun to find out, and then get on with everyday life.

43

Until I lived with my paternal grandmother in 1977 knowing my ancestry was a zero. But listening to her stories about her ancestry piqued my interest. In 1980, after her death, I did a little bit of investigation and determined that my grandmother’s Uncle was a Chicago policeman who gave it up to move to Arizona to involve himself in gold and copper mining. I personally have in my possession a stock certificate for 20,000 shares (at $1 per share) of some copper mining company formed in 1903. I also have 100 shares of a gold mining company. If either of these companies exist (I haven’t looked), I could be a millionaire. If I could prove provenance.

So yes, knowing your ancestry has some fun merit, if not any value.

44

Not really. I know who my grandparents were. They were just people. I don’t have any interest or curiosity to go back further.

45

We had two family history legends on my mother’s side. My mother thought there was Pennsylvania Dutch (her words, I’m not sure if that’s Amish or something else) in her family. Her father told us that he thought we had a native American in our ancestry. Neither of these stories have survived research.

46

Any interest in who anyone beyond my grandparents were was killed when in my teens, my Dad told me that my grandfather was blackballed by his family. I’m can’t remember if it was before or after he immigrated to Hawaii from Okinawa. This was confirmed when I asked my Dad (I think this was before he told me about the blackballing or not) to ask him why he never returned home* and he told my Dad in Japanese. “What for, there’s nothing for me there.”

The only relative I ever knew of on my paternal grandfather’s side was his youngest brother who came to Hawaii despite the family’s protests. From what I understand, he was blackballed too. After a while he disappeared and I don’t remember is he died or returned to Okinawa.

*Returning home for most early immigrant’s was impossible anyway because of the low plantation wages.

In addition, one or both my grandmothers were picture brides, so any contact with their family was lost. I know my paternal grandfather’s family is from Yamaguchi prefecture and I think one of my Aunt’s visited our relatives there once. My Dad has never said exactly where in Okinawa my grandfather is from, but he did visit family there while to on a business trip to bring back the cremains of his oldest sister, whom he barely knew because she married and moved to Okinawa while he was still very young.

One of Dad’s brother’s was estranged from the family for the rest of his life after my grandfather refused to attend his wedding because he married a white women. He moved to New York and when my Dad couldn’t locate him when my grandmother died, he said he’s either in jail or filthy rich and it didn’t matter because he obviously didn’t want to be found. One of his daughters finally meet with my Mom (Dad passed way in the 90’s) and my sisters about a decade ago, since he told her she could contact the rest of the family after he died. He did and she did.

So yeah…as far as I’m concerned, whether my ancestors were filthy rich or in jail means absolutely nothing to me.

47

So, does “hung for witchcraft” mean it had a pentagram tattooed on it? :slight_smile:

48

well my family was german indian mixed with irish and polish and among the first settlers in Indiana and Michigan

the Michigan branch was formed when one of the 2 brothers decided to run off with the local indian princess of what would be Kokomo Indiana one day the got as far as what would be Niles Michigan

the other brother stayed there …due to t exhaustive paperwork I can prove I’m related to oh 60 percent of both areas believe me there are places where people with the same last name but not related have gotten grief over the 6-8 last names in the family tree

we are known for being farmers preachers outlaws or general hell raisers (or all of them at the same time) oh and the occasional sheriff who mostly spent his time arresting the aforementioned relatives beleive me im known as one of the few thats never been arrested for anything …

49

Some people don’t seem interested in their family tree. My great-grandmother was a prominent woman but neither her son (with whom I was rather close) nor her grand-son (my father) ever mentioned her. Her father (my gt-gt-grandfather) was prominent enough to serve as a U.S. Congressman, but I’d have never known this without pursuing genealogy. My father’s 1st cousin, whom I last met in the late 1960’s when he was a student at Stanford, became C.E.O. of a Fortune-500 company but we’d never know that except for my sister tracking him down for her genealogy.

So you know the names of your seize quartiers! Very few people do. I worked on my genealogy for years before completing my seize quartiers. It turned out that the last hold-out came from a rather prominent family. (It’s through her that I’m a distant cousin of Teddy Roosevelt.)

You’re fortunate that you don’t care about the ancestries of these early English colonists. About 95% of the pedigrees you’ll find on-line for them are fake!

50

I’ve never understood why it’s cared about enough by enough people to support an entire industry. My god! I could not be less interested.

51

Everyone in my immediate family and my mother’s extended family knows that Granddad’s mother was full-blooded Native American. We each also know that she was of a different tribe than everyone else thinks. My brother thinks we’re Mescalero Apache because he’s big into macho stuff. I know we’re really Seminole because that’s just a cool-sounding word.

NOTE: I have utmost respect for First Nations peoples and their heritage. I’m making fun of us whiteys.

52

I feel envious of you. I think I’d be much more interested in my family history if it gave me that sense of place. But my parents left their home region (Suffolk) before I was born, so i feel little connection with there, or the place I grew up, as my parents had left their hearts in Ipswich.

So whilst a few people in my family have traced our lines back about 500 years, the fact that most of my ancestors were farm labourers and dockers in a distant county doesn’t get me very excited.

And I LOVE history.

53

I enjoy history, so learning that my direct ancestors were part of important historical events like the Irish Famine (my many times great grandmother got pregnant in Ireland in 1848, she and her husband moved to England, probably in desperation, to give birth to my great,…great grandfather, they all later emigrated to the U.S.) is really intriguing to me.

54

I burn for this. Probably more than almost anyone else in my extended family tree.

It started when I was young and my paternal grandmother told me there were Mayflower passengers on her side of the family (confirmed in research done by her aunt decades before) - people I’d actually heard of. That intrigued the history buff in me. So I started asking around other parts of the family and started getting all sorts of stuff - mostly bare-bones notes and a lot of speculation.

But more information kept surfacing, often at serendipitous moments, and those finds kept fueling the fire. Who were these people? What did they do? Where did they live? And so on and so forth.

Now I have a far-reaching network of cousins, many of whom I’ve met, and a fairly rich tapestry of details that, until I dug them up again, lay hidden from view just beneath the surface. And it’s interesting to see how, in a chaos theory kind of way, they had an influence on my very existence long before I was born. For example: one ancestor each on both sides of my family survived one of the biggest dam failure disasters in US history outside of the legendary Johnstown flood. Both were young and unmarried; one was a boy of eight. Had either of them died in that disaster, I wouldn’t be here.

And it’s damned fun to see what kind of things you have in common with folks whose names may otherwise be long forgotten. On a visit to Birmingham (UK) over the holidays, I headed down to the city library to do some research on a pair of 3x-greats who came from the area. Turns out GGG-granddad was an active Chartist, mentioned several times in the local newspaper for his efforts in organizing the local working folk. A pre-Marxist socialist, if you will. That one made me very happy, for sure.

Then there was the old Swedish soldier busted for drinking on duty, and being sent to Denmark for a war he actually ended up not fighting in. The refugees from the Potato Famine. The uncle who survived being imprisoned in Andersonville. And the ex-girlfriend who turns out to be an eleventh cousin - on both sides of the family, through the same ancestor that made my parents seventh cousins. And the otherwise unremarkable uncle whose suicide made the local daily papers.

Beneath all the weird and fun stories, however, there is a sense for me that they are – for a little while longer – not truly lost to history. Someone knows their story. Someone remembers their names. Someone keeps their memory alive. Someone dusted away the cobwebs of speculation and half-remembered stories and found the truth. Not always interesting, not always pleasant, but the truth nonetheless.

55

I began to suspect as much when I found one that linked me to Anne Bradstreet. :dubious:

56

My genetics professor said, "Before you make babies, know the background of the other chromazone.

Good advice.

57

My family is famously uninterested in our ancestry. Not just me, but my cousins too. I have a family tree made by the husband of some second cousin who loved this area, and did ours when he ran out of his family.

My daughter did 23 and me. She came out 50% Ashkenazi Jewish, which would be my half, so there is no reason for me to have one done.

58

Why, specifically? Medical issues only, or something else?

59

I couldn’t care less about my ancestors. Much to my mother’s disappointment. She wrote a book on my geonoly on both her and my father’s side that I’ve never even picked up. I only know the names of two of my grandparents 3 of my aunts and uncles and I think there are 4 more out there. I’m interested in the present but some person who spawned some person who’s related to me is a big snore. I think my parents did one of the DNA thing and I tried to talk them out of it because I don’t want my DNA out there.

60

Medical and mental issues. Is there a history of…bad traits?