I think this somewhat depends on your background as well as personal interest. For Americans of a ‘general mixed European’ background, typically mainly Protestant (whether or not religious now), whether this ancestor was from Wales and this one from Switzerland etc doesn’t have much direct impact on your life.
All my ancestors in last at least 3-4 generations are ethnic Irish, though more recent one to arrive in the US was 1867. That makes a difference in cultural traits than if I had ‘general mixed European’ background.
More so I think if one is ‘African American’ mainly the descendant of people freed in the US after the Civil War as compared to ‘African American’ with most of family recent immigrants from Africa or the Caribbean. The past collective experience of one or the other family might have a quite significant impact on the life of the current generation, besides the shared effect of being perceived differently based on appearance.
OTOH who anyone is related to from say 1400 is of much less significance IMO. Most people alive in 1400 who have any descendants now have a huge number of them, probably most people have some ancestor who was a Roman soldier. But the past several generations might contain family social patterns that are actually relevant to one’s life.
I’m slightly interested, but not very interested. I signed up for ancestry.com when they had a sale right before the last census release and did some digging, but I had no reason to renew when my subscription ran out.
I’ve also done 23andme, but that was more for the health reasons when they were strongly pushing those. I look at the site from time to time to see what’s there - but I’m one of the people that gets complained about because I’m not altogether interested in helping someone piece together their family tree.
O am a very Old New Englander on my mother’s side. I’m a direct descendant of Anne Lucy Howard, whose family helped settle Boston. The same Howard family went to Ohio, married into the Taft family, and gave u all the politios (and one President).
That’s a source of pride in her family.
We have been unable to trace my father’s family, having been fed a line of bull from him. I’d love to know who they were.
I care because it’s my story. I only know the part of my story that begins at my birth, and what happened only a couple of generations before it. On my dad’s side, questions about where our family came from were met with vague mentions of Pennsylvania coal mines and a quick change of the subject. On my mom’s side, Grandma knew extensively about her dad growing up next to John Dillinger’s family’s farm in Indiana, and had vague recollections of her mom growing up in Arizona, but knew little else. My grandfather rarely spoke of his family or upbringing, it just made him sad and it was considered off-limits for discussion.
So the entirety of my knowledge of the prologue (as it were) to my story consists of a handful of vague dates and places, and that’s it.
That is why I’m interested in knowing who my ancestors are, so I can know my own story.
I discovered Francis Duchouquet was my great great great great great grandfather. He was quarter Native American (French Indian). His wife (my great great great great great grandmother) was 100% Shawnee.
He was quite famous in his day as an English-Shawnee interpreter. He was the interpreter at the Treaty of Greenville.
There is a Duchouquet Township in Auglaize County, Ohio.
When Henry Louis Gates Jr. has African-American guests on his show Finding Your Roots, it always comes up how rare it is to be able to trace their roots further back than the first freed generation, because slaves were not named in the censuses before the Civil War, just counted, and their relationships to each other were (parent/child, or marriage, for example) were not noted either.
I’ve never had any interest in genealogy, but over the past couple decades I’ve been contacted by other people in my ‘family’ – like fifth cousins in one case – seeking info to fill out their charts. <shrug> I’ve given them the names/birthdates/marriages and so forth that I happen to know of, why not? But I really know nothing at all further back than my grandparents.
One of those contacters, though, did tell me a slightly interesting story. Apparently one of our mutual ancestors won/was given/awarded? a Golden Ticket to the Wild Bill Hickock show back in the 1880s. Supposedly it was good for admission to any performance in perpetuity for whoever held it. He was trying to track it down, to see if anyone in the family knew what had happened with it or even actually still had it.
Not this branch of the family that’s for sure. Actually, if we HAD ever had a thing like that, no doubt it was tucked into a book to mark a page and promptly forgotten all about.
I want to know about my ancestors’ lives simply because they are a well distributed assortment of people living 50, 100, 150 or 200 years ago. I find details of how people lived fascinating. I have no interest in the sort of 23 and Me genetic background approach. I want to know were they married, how many kids, were they rich, poor, what were their jobs, etc. The more you look, the more you see, the more you learn about them. I don’t think it tells me anything about myself though.
From what I know, there are native-born Italians of ethnically Greek backrgound. I’m not sure if this is the case, but maybe their ancestors came there in ancient times even. Could this woman be of such background?
As I said above, I am of Serbian stock. But for example, my mother’s family come from Vranje, a town in Southern Serbia. From what I know, there was once a Greek minority there. If a DNA test were done on me, perhaps some Greek ancestry would be found there as well? Going even further back, that family line lived in a village right on the border with Bulgaria. For all I know, I could have a Bulgarian ancestor too, who knows, when you go that far back.
I ran a genealogy scan that reported more than my family lore’s Quakers and unmentioned but obvious Cherokees. Famous and infamous folks are nearby. That’s nice. I’m not them and they ain’t me. Trace back a millennium and we’re all cousins. Let’s do some incest, hey?
Amusingly my anscestors seem to be the ones on the sidelines.
First baby born in the New Word? Gr-gr-gr (etc.) uncle. (Peregrine White)
Famous member of the underground railroad? Cousin. Might even be once removed, I don’t remember.
My uncle served in Korea. My mom’s cousin served in Vietnam. Various siblings of my grandparents served in WWi, WWII and previous wars.
But none of my known ancestors actually served. All the passed down paraphernalia is from cousins, uncles, siblings, etc. So I have no desire to keep any of the stuff. The stores are fine.
Happy that someone else wants to do the research. I have no interest in learning how to dig through German church records from the 1600s in the hopes of finding marriage records of possible ancestors. Ancestors who do not have known birthdates, or even birthplaces.
My grandmother really wanted to know where/when her (Scottish?) ancestor came to the U.S. She died without discovering this information. But she thought this information is out there.
I think there is geneological information what will never be found. And that’s okay for me.
I find it interesting, maybe because my mother was a pre-WW2 refugee; she was born in Narva, Estonia and sent to Finland for safety shortly after Germany invaded Poland when she was barely 6. She knew that and her maiden name about her past. That’s it.
At least ancestry has let me know her background genetically is more than just Estonian.
But yeah, my family is one of those “related to no one famous” families.
In part it’s just like any hobby involving collecting. I collected beer cans for a while. Didn’t have a particular reason to, I just liked having a bunch of different ones.
But genealogy has also given me:
Links to history. It’s a lot easier to understand and relate to past events when I can link them to an ancestor.
Appreciation from relatives. Some people are interested in their ancestry, but not in doing the work.
Not interested in my own family, but a couple of years ago I came across a very unusual, perhaps unique, name on a gravestone. I should mention that I’m an avid amateur photographer, and old cemeteries are a favorite subject.
The lady in question died in 1921, and I was so taken with her name that I went to a website and traced her family forward a couple of generations.
This only got me to the 1950’s, and there were a LOT of progeny, plus there are a flock of same-last-name but probably not-related folk in W Maryland, neighboring WV, and Og help me probably also in nearby PA. I got bored, despite enjoying history, and visiting and photographing local historical sites. The price of having too many interests.
I have been compiling genealogical data that some of my relatives and wife’s relatives have researched, although I have not done any original research. I have been showing my kids about their family history (which is an interesting mix of Ashkenazi Jews, Western Europeans, Egyptians, and Iraqis). I think it’s fun and interesting. But I have never had any drive to find out “who I am” nor think that finding my ancestors will answer that question. I am pretty much who I am regardless of who my ancestors were or what they did. It’s interesting to think about people’s lives from a hundred (or hundreds) of years ago who were basically people just like we are today except without smartphones.
I totally agree with this. The one caveat is that it would be cool to say that my great, great grand uncle was once king of Germany or whatever, but that would just be conversation fodder.
My ancestors have are essentially irrelevant to who I am as a person today.
I knew three of my grandparents quite well (the fourth died long before I was born). I knew two of my great-grandparents well, too. Two others I have only the vaguest memories of.
Beyond that, there’s nothing really to discover. My great-grandparents were born in Ireland and the families were quite poor and unlikely to have left much in the way of traceable history, going back to the dawn of time. As far as I, or anyone in the family knows, that’s all there is to the family history.
A relative did one of those 23-and-me things and got a report consistent with that, except that there was a surprising amount of sub-Saharan ancestry. Inexplicable. The only theory anyone can come up with is that, many generations ago, there was a sailor with a girl in every port.
This is a somewhat amusing story to me, but that’s all. It does not affect my sense of who I am in the least.
On my maternal side, a cousin (by marriage - he was more interested in our family than any of the blood relatives) discovered that our first US ancestor came in 1823, literally settling in OH, where the wagon wheel broke. He gave up his allegiance to the King of France when he became a citizen, and I’ve seen images of this paperwork. I’d grown up thinking I was 1/4 German (the other 3 grandparents claimed Irish ancestry) but it turns out, we were from Alsace, which at the time was under French control. Further research showed that the family came to Alsace from Switzerland, as part of a resettlement program after a war left good, fertile land but not enough labor to work it. I’d love to know more about the decision to leave Switzerland. Funnily enough, I was once working with a guy from NE China who, after hearing this story, wasn’t surprised because he thought I looked “Swiss.” On my maternal grandma’s (Irish) side, it was cool to hear the family lore that the farmland (and the courdoroy road through it) was eventually sold to Case Western Reserve, and at one time, had an UG Railroad stop on it (my grandma told stories from her grandma about being sent out to the empty cabin with a pot of stew meant for travelers). All of that is pretty cool to know.
On my Dad’s side - they were all Boston Irish and no one knows much about the history other than my great-great grandfather was a police sergeant (typical) and sent two sons to Harvard (Law and Med - among the first Catholic boys to graduate) but I’ve always assumed that they suppressed a lot of the earlier story (no idea what county we came from, let alone when) and while I’d really love to know more, at this stage in my life I don’t really have the time to explore.
