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If you remember what genealogy was like before the internet, you'd have an appreciation of how easy it is now. It's a completely different activity from what it used to be. It still blows my mind how many historical records we have at our fingertips. If you enjoy history and online research, it's easy to get hooked on genealogy. And it doesn't have to be your own genealogy, you can help other people with theirs.
I always just click the "Rate this post positively" in the bottom left of the post.
I mean, I figured out the other way is to click on the scales but honestly that is so untuitive compared to just using the actual named link that I never think of it and it's multiple clicks so...yeah.
Oh, and it always malfunctions - I have to hit 'add to reputation" twice to get the popup to close and then it dings me with an error that I can't give a reputation twice and then I have to close THAT popup so I NEVER do it that way - super clunky whoever designed it.
Genealogy is not for everyone. Not everybody has the same interests.
In my family, I'm the only one that cares. My mother doesn't understand my enthusiasm.
I was just saying this to someone today. I had contacted another second cousin to see if she could help me identify what I thought was her grandmother, my grandmother's sister. she sent me a few photos that she had. but when I sent her the one I had and asked if she thought it looked like her grandmother, she answered "don't know". I was just asking an opinion but she didn't appear to want to know more. she never knew her grandmother and I thought that could be why. but it could be she's just not interested in that.
I never had much of an interest, but my kids took to it since there was so much mystery about my side of the family.
They found out all kinds of stuff about my family, including in some cases pictures that went way back. They also uncovered the fate of my (gangster) biological father, who I never knew (it wasn't good).
I mean, I figured out the other way is to click on the scales but honestly that is so untuitive compared to just using the actual named link that I never think of it and it's multiple clicks so...yeah.
Oh, and it always malfunctions - I have to hit 'add to reputation" twice to get the popup to close and then it dings me with an error that I can't give a reputation twice and then I have to close THAT popup so I NEVER do it that way - super clunky whoever designed it.
You only need to hit it once according to a thread I saw. Something happened in an upgrade.
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Originally Posted by Tallysmom
Really! I’ve never had an issue with that. And I do everything on my phone. I’ll keep that in mind, thank you!
That’s one of the reasons I always mention that I am on an iPhone, because sometimes things happen on my friends phones who have other operating systems. But they don’t happen to me. And I’m sure there are things that happen on mine that don’t happen on their‘s.
And whenever I called for tech-support, they always wanted to know exactly what I was using so I just assume that that’s what you’re supposed to do. Tell everybody exactly what operating system you’re using.
I don't usually come here on my cell or I'd know more. I have an android which has the rep issue when you come here from an email because it opens in gmail and not in a browser.
You're right, different phones may not have the issue.
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Originally Posted by tobyo
I was just saying this to someone today. I had contacted another second cousin to see if she could help me identify what I thought was her grandmother, my grandmother's sister. she sent me a few photos that she had. but when I sent her the one I had and asked if she thought it looked like her grandmother, she answered "don't know". I was just asking an opinion but she didn't appear to want to know more. she never knew her grandmother and I thought that could be why. but it could be she's just not interested in that.
Watch what you say to one cousin about another, trust me.
I didn't know my grandmother but so far, I do recognize her in pictures, especially when she's older. It's harder when she's younger with her sisters but then again, she was the youngest.
Glad I waded all the way to the back of this thread before posting. But, I'm going to share why I get into genealogy anyway.
I've always been a history gal. I love it. In undergrad I had a "North American" history class. It mostly covered the US and Meico, because that was my professor's interest. One of our projects was to do our American family tree and find information on them. I asked my parents for the info they had and it wasn't a lot. My dad knew his grandmother was a DAR member and my mom knew that she was Czech and that was about it. This was like 2004ish. So Rootsweb and Ancestry were around, but not nearly as recognizable as they are today. I was able to piece together a good chunk of both their trees around that time. I thought it was all very interesting but let it go until well after I graduated from Grad school in 2014.
I had, I think out of boredom, gone back to Ancestry and started working again. Mostly out of my love of history and my desire to know what my family went through during history. Then, I went to a diversity work training. It was a lot of berating white people and telling me (and my fellow white co-workers) what horrible of people we were. Then, the facilitator asked the question, "When did your ancestors become white?" And that hit my head, heart and soul really hard. I had already broken down some brick walls and knew that there were some lines that suffered more than others. But it just got me hard. I am a social worker. And now, my purpose is to know my family's immigration stories to put the current history of the world into perspective. My most recent ancestors came to the US in 1898, so it's been 120 years. It's been a while, but if I go back only 4 generations there is an immigrant. And it just like, "Were they white in that time period?" I know my Irish ancesotr wasn't. Were my Swedish ancestors "white" when they stepped off the boat? Were the Czech relatives? The German? The Jewish?
One of my closest friends has really gotten into tracing her ancestry and genealogy. She has sent in DNA to at least two different places, gotten the results which have been pored over. She also takes a fairly intellectual approach reading books on European ancestry in general.
I would like to get into this at least a little, so I can share with her, but frankly, I just don’t see the appeal or and am even a little put off by it.
Here are my objections which may seem silly as I really do not know much about the field/hobby. Maybe someone can set me straight?
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1. I don’t think knowing my ancestors is going to tell me any more about myself or really enhance my life. Already I feel kind of different from the relatives I know I have and think a fair portion of them are well ... kinda crazy. Do I want more crazy in my life? Um ... not really?
I'd say there are two parts to an answer of this.
A) The people that came before you, what they did, who they met with to produce you or your ancestors, their choices, locations, etc... all of this resulted in you being born where you did, with whatever opportunities you did or didn't have, your genetic traits and predispositions, and your cultural environment. You are a sum of all the people that came before you whether you know it or not.
TLDR; It's a massive part of you whether you know it or not. So from this perspective it's not a question of relevance but of choosing to be ignorant of that impactful information or not.
B) Kind of coming from the opposite perspective... that a good portion (if not all) of yourself is what you choose to define yourself by. Then just like you can choose to have hobbies like reading fiction, watching movies, crafting things, going to church, etc. You choose to make those things a part of your self identity. You didn't need to, but you chose to. Likewise you can choose to fold in parts of your genealogy, of your heritage, into your own self identity in whatever way you want. Many of us find that rewarding.
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2. When I was growing up, I saw genealogical accounts of both my mother and father’s side of the family. My father’s side even had a little book made up. I didn’t really think it was that interesting at the time. I mean I know that my mother’s family is basically all German and my father’s family was a mix of English, Irish, Scottish and Swedish. Ok, so? My friend’s response to this is that I don’t really know the truth. I don’t know about the quality of the research that went into those books. But let’s say the genealogical research based on DNA showed that I had some distant relatives in, I don’t know, say ... India. So what? It doesn’t make me a different person ... it doesn’t really even make me part Indian because I didn’t grow up in that culture.
You didn't grow up in those cultures of your distant ancestors, but those people of that culture led to the choices and actions that resulted in you. You are a sum of all those ancestors and their actions. Their cultures and choices effected you whether you realize it or not.
Also when you learn of a personal connection to people of a certain time and culture, the history surrounding that becomes a lot more interesting and relevant. Before getting into genealogy I wasn't that interested in American history, such as the Civil War and American Revolution. I found Medieval history for more interesting. Though when I learned which ancestors served in the Civil War and the American Revolution and what they faced it really sparked an interest in that history since I'm made up of the DNA and the resulting actions of those people. I wouldn't be here if they didn't do what they did, so it makes that history so much more relevant.
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3. Are those companies even totally legit? How do you know the little maps of where your ancestors lived are actually accurate?
In short the major ones are legit. Though there are simply limitations in the technology and what services are offered. Regarding DNA there simply is just so much your DNA can tell you. It can tell you matches, how distant they are, and the ethnic side of DNA is pretty vague and mostly only relevant to major regions. Basically to distinguish European, East Asian, and African DNA. Europeans intermixed so much it's really hard to distinguish what French DNA is vs say English or German DNA. So as long as you understand the limitations it's fine.
There are more advanced things you can do with certain DNA tests to find cousin matches etc to confirm or disprove ancestry as well.
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4. The maps my friends was so excited about look really vague to me.
This is pretty typical for anything someone doesn't understand. For example someone can say a TV show is amazing and if you jump in say season 3 episode 4 and don't understand it then it came seem super vague and confusing. If you watch it from the beginning you might gain a whole different experience though.
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5. isn’t this a tad narcissistic?
To me it's the opposite. I find that to not care about all the people that made choices and combined their DNA to result in you is actually the narcissistic view (which I myself held before getting into genealogy). The idea that I am myself, none of this matters, when we are literally and objectively the result of these people and their choices is pretty self centered IMHO
Glad I waded all the way to the back of this thread before posting. But, I'm going to share why I get into genealogy anyway.
I've always been a history gal. I love it. In undergrad I had a "North American" history class. It mostly covered the US and Meico, because that was my professor's interest. One of our projects was to do our American family tree and find information on them. I asked my parents for the info they had and it wasn't a lot. My dad knew his grandmother was a DAR member and my mom knew that she was Czech and that was about it. This was like 2004ish. So Rootsweb and Ancestry were around, but not nearly as recognizable as they are today. I was able to piece together a good chunk of both their trees around that time. I thought it was all very interesting but let it go until well after I graduated from Grad school in 2014.
I had, I think out of boredom, gone back to Ancestry and started working again. Mostly out of my love of history and my desire to know what my family went through during history. Then, I went to a diversity work training. It was a lot of berating white people and telling me (and my fellow white co-workers) what horrible of people we were. Then, the facilitator asked the question, "When did your ancestors become white?" And that hit my head, heart and soul really hard. I had already broken down some brick walls and knew that there were some lines that suffered more than others. But it just got me hard. I am a social worker. And now, my purpose is to know my family's immigration stories to put the current history of the world into perspective. My most recent ancestors came to the US in 1898, so it's been 120 years. It's been a while, but if I go back only 4 generations there is an immigrant. And it just like, "Were they white in that time period?" I know my Irish ancesotr wasn't. Were my Swedish ancestors "white" when they stepped off the boat? Were the Czech relatives? The German? The Jewish?
Thanks for telling your story.
I've shared that I'm just about all Hungarian but found out through DNA that I have a tiny percent Italian. I haven't found that Italian yet so I'm not sure how far back they are. Before DNA I would have told him they've always been white Hungarians. I'm sure your teacher would have brought up the Mongolians in Hungary which I did find in the DNA of my dad's brother and my male cousin on my mothers side that lives in Hungary.
Glad I waded all the way to the back of this thread before posting. But, I'm going to share why I get into genealogy anyway.
I've always been a history gal. I love it. In undergrad I had a "North American" history class. It mostly covered the US and Meico, because that was my professor's interest. One of our projects was to do our American family tree and find information on them. I asked my parents for the info they had and it wasn't a lot. My dad knew his grandmother was a DAR member and my mom knew that she was Czech and that was about it. This was like 2004ish. So Rootsweb and Ancestry were around, but not nearly as recognizable as they are today. I was able to piece together a good chunk of both their trees around that time. I thought it was all very interesting but let it go until well after I graduated from Grad school in 2014.
I had, I think out of boredom, gone back to Ancestry and started working again. Mostly out of my love of history and my desire to know what my family went through during history. Then, I went to a diversity work training. It was a lot of berating white people and telling me (and my fellow white co-workers) what horrible of people we were. Then, the facilitator asked the question, "When did your ancestors become white?" And that hit my head, heart and soul really hard. I had already broken down some brick walls and knew that there were some lines that suffered more than others. But it just got me hard. I am a social worker. And now, my purpose is to know my family's immigration stories to put the current history of the world into perspective. My most recent ancestors came to the US in 1898, so it's been 120 years. It's been a while, but if I go back only 4 generations there is an immigrant. And it just like, "Were they white in that time period?" I know my Irish ancesotr wasn't. Were my Swedish ancestors "white" when they stepped off the boat? Were the Czech relatives? The German? The Jewish?
Thanks for telling your story.
I've shared that I'm just about all Hungarian but found out through DNA that I have a tiny percent Italian. I haven't found that Italian yet so I'm not sure how far back they are. Before DNA I would have told him they've always been white Hungarians. I'm sure your teacher would have brought up the Mongolians in Hungary which I did find in the DNA of my dad's brother and my male cousin on my mothers side that lives in Hungary.
I echo Roselvr's "thanks."
My ability to satisfy my own curiosity about my ancestral roots is limited. My father's mother was born around the modern Slovak-Hungarian border. My father always told me that his mother did not like to talk about her European past, except that the family was affluent in Europe, destitute here. That means to me that nothing good was going to happen to them. She was born around 1890, and came over, apparently, around 1910-1914, getting married shortly thereafter and not that happily. I know even less about my father's father's (i.e. my paternal grandfather's) family, except that my paternal grandfather was born in the U.S. His parents came from a similar area that my paternal grandmother's came from.
My maternal grandmother's parents, thus two of my great-grandparents, lived in Kiev until the early 1890's. Sometime during the 1890's the Czar's army was about to force another five years of service for Great-Grandpa Jack. He and his wife fled. We thought he came to the U.S. but we found an 1896 photo developed by a Montreal photo studio. They relocated to Yonkers, New York to establish a thriving shoe repair business and never looked back. Ditto my maternal father. The son of immigrants, he became a dentist in Yonkers and had no eye for the rearview mirror.
They were apparently highly intelligent people. I suspect that similar people fled the tender mercies of the Czars and Communists over the years. I suspect that most people with brains between their ears fled or attempted to flee this loony bin as well. Very few people who emigrated from the killing fields of Europe, or their ancestors, have the least bit of nostalgic attraction for their ancestral past and did not pass much of their knowledge or memories to their children or grandchildren. That is even more true of those that escaped the Holocaust.
In other words, there was very little to be nostalgic about. Most people came to the U.S. for a reason, at least back in the day. They did not take repeated trips back.
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