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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?
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?
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.
3. Are those companies even totally legit? How do you know the little maps of where your ancestors lived are actually accurate?
4. The maps my friends was so excited about look really vague to me.
5. isn’t this a tad narcissistic?
So, why are you so into this? Can you explain to me what makes this a great hobby?
I can respond as someone who researched the genealogy of one grandparent, as a favor to a cousin. So I didn't get into it for any personal motives of my own, no attachment of any kind.
I happened to find a treasure trove online about that lineage, so I got sucked into it much farther than I'd intended or had been asked to delve into. It became like a puzzle, to connect the dots. Who doesn't like to solve a puzzle? And btw, none of us have had our DNA "done".
But also, through the course of tracing the lineage all the way back to England and one of the first boats to reach the colonies, I gained some surprising historical insights. You learn a lot about life 1-, 2-, perhaps even 3 hundred years ago. You wouldn't really think you'd learn much about how people lived by simply tracing a lineage back farther and farther, but you do. You learn about how important status was, and about what happens when people are of high or low status, what their marriage options are, what happens to women, married or not, in eras of no birth control, and so on. I learned that Puritans were not popular, and got run out of town in some parts of the northeast. Who knew? You can even stumble upon hidden histories that have been suppressed, until conditions became favorable for ethnic cleansing and whatnot to be revealed, studied and documented.
Anyway, it becomes intriguing as you go along. Those names on the page come alive, and you learn about the society of any given time, and about events of the time. These discoveries keep you going.
I would like to see Ruth4Truth's post in bronze, put on a plaque and mailed to the OP.
I also love the puzzle aspect. I'm a name nerd so I love seeing all the names, too. I've always enjoyed history and have learned so much, and almost all of it to do with ordinary people. I've grown to love and respect my ancestors and yours! What people went through, what they accomplished. Most people today have no clue what life was like in the past. After decades of research I have gained enough sense of history that I can sit there and correct movies and TV shows with story lines based in the past. "It wasn't like that. It was like this." They could hire me as a consultant.
Genealogy is about the only way an ordinary person can purse historical research and these days we can do it from home! I remember having to go to libraries, page through tons of books, load microfilm readers, go up blind alley after blind alley until you found what you're looking for. I've found ancestors paging through microfilm on an educated guess of where they might be living. Now we can find so much and so fast. It's awesome.
And it does NOT have to be your own family. I regularly do "genealogical acts of kindness" online. Maybe no one will look at it, but if they do, it's there to help them out or get them started. I know from the "thank you"s I've received that some of it does help other people find their family history. I've even been offered money by way of thanks. I just say I'm glad to have been of help.
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Originally Posted by Ruth4Truth
I can respond as someone who researched the genealogy of one grandparent, as a favor to a cousin. So I didn't get into it for any personal motives of my own, no attachment of any kind.
I happened to find a treasure trove online about that lineage, so I got sucked into it much farther than I'd intended or had been asked to delve into. It became like a puzzle, to connect the dots. Who doesn't like to solve a puzzle? And btw, none of us have had our DNA "done".
But also, through the course of tracing the lineage all the way back to England and one of the first boats to reach the colonies, I gained some surprising historical insights. You learn a lot about life 1-, 2-, perhaps even 3 hundred years ago. You wouldn't really think you'd learn much about how people lived by simply tracing a lineage back farther and farther, but you do. You learn about how important status was, and about what happens when people are of high or low status, what their marriage options are, what happens to women, married or not, in eras of no birth control, and so on. I learned that Puritans were not popular, and got run out of town in some parts of the northeast. Who knew? You can even stumble upon hidden histories that have been suppressed, until conditions became favorable for ethnic cleansing and whatnot to be revealed, studied and documented.
Anyway, it becomes intriguing as you go along. Those names on the page come alive, and you learn about the society of any given time, and about events of the time. These discoveries keep you going.
I can respond as someone who researched the genealogy of one grandparent, as a favor to a cousin. So I didn't get into it for any personal motives of my own, no attachment of any kind.
I happened to find a treasure trove online about that lineage, so I got sucked into it much farther than I'd intended or had been asked to delve into. It became like a puzzle, to connect the dots. Who doesn't like to solve a puzzle? And btw, none of us have had our DNA "done".
But also, through the course of tracing the lineage all the way back to England and one of the first boats to reach the colonies, I gained some surprising historical insights. You learn a lot about life 1-, 2-, perhaps even 3 hundred years ago. You wouldn't really think you'd learn much about how people lived by simply tracing a lineage back farther and farther, but you do. You learn about how important status was, and about what happens when people are of high or low status, what their marriage options are, what happens to women, married or not, in eras of no birth control, and so on. I learned that Puritans were not popular, and got run out of town in some parts of the northeast. Who knew? You can even stumble upon hidden histories that have been suppressed, until conditions became favorable for ethnic cleansing and whatnot to be revealed, studied and documented.
Anyway, it becomes intriguing as you go along. Those names on the page come alive, and you learn about the society of any given time, and about events of the time. These discoveries keep you going.
I would like to see Ruth4Truth's post in bronze, put on a plaque and mailed to the OP.
I also love the puzzle aspect.
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Originally Posted by suzy_q2010
This!
Your comments about history are on point, too.
R4T's post was interesting and excellent as were the comments.
I've been at this a long time. I have found all of my immigrant ancestors on my main lines with a few exceptions where I'm very close (some English and Dutch in the 1600s are not pinned down to a date or a ship but were early immigrants). I consider myself to be knowlegeable in history but when I started tracing my Irish and Pomeranian ancestors and genealogy in Europe I became more aware of some threads of history that I knew only a little about.
I knew the story of English domination of Ireland but not on a personal ancestral level. I travelled to Ireland and UK last year and and the story got a little more personal. The English or Anglo-Irish were firmly in control and abusive. My 2-great grandmother was sentenced to six months hard labor for stealing three potatoes for the family to eat for Christmas dinner in 1865. That was well after the potato famine but conditions were so bad they could not feed the family. That was the normal existence. Petty crimes of subsistence were heavily punished but there was little or no efforts by the English to make life easier. Any effort at initiative for the sake of survival was punished. Part of the family got out to the US in 1876 but had to leave some behind.
In the 1800s Pomerania (German then, Polish now), I would find one ancestral church record but no others until I found one in a different rural parish and then later a third someplace else. I began to think that my ancestors were a military family but the records were not in regimental parishes and there was no other evidence. It didn't make sense that they moved so much. I found a German researcher who looked at the church records and said these were manorial parishes. My ancestors were workers who lived and worked on the untitled nobility's (Junker's) manor farms and moved from one manor to another. Their records were in the archives of the different manorial parishes. The several manors might have been owned by a single family or different families and covered about 30 miles. The largest city nearby was Danzig (Gdansk) but they did not seem to be city people at all. I knew there were large manors and in the feudal times the workers were tied to the land but this was in the 1850-1880 period. Germany wasn't unified until 1871 or much industrialized until even later. Pomerania remained largely an agricultural area.
Thanks for the responses. I just remembered another reason why I don’t do genealogy. My husband’s ex-wife was extremely into genealogy, and he hates everything that reminds him of her.
The one thing that I do find interesting is looking at old cemeteries (don’t matter if my relatives were buried there or not), but that is something he will refuse to do because she used to do the cemetery thing. I guess I don’t care enough to press the point.
Maybe I’ll just lurk here and read the stories of everyone’s ancestors. I’m sure there are a lot of good ones.
That's one thing I'm thankful for. My wife and my ex get along fairly well. The way my wife looks at it, when we try to do something with my sons, if she can make it, my ex is invited too. She's part of the family.
My wife tried to help my ex on her family tree. but both present and ex have the same problem. Their family name is Smith. Ex's uncle had done their geneology but when he died, his adult kids threw it all away in trash. My wife was helping her so she could fix a book for my sons of their family tree through both families. No success.
I always joke with my wife that one of the main reasons she married me was to have two more family trees to work on. (My dad's side and my mom's) lol
There are already a lot of good answers here, so I'll chime in with a few specific comments.
I'm a researcher by trade, and since childhood I've loved learning about different cultures and historical periods. I also grew up with virtually no contact with relatives other than my parents and siblings, yet both of my parents passed on a lot of colorful family lore. Doing genealogy has helped bring together many of my skills and interests while helping answer the "How Did I Get Here" question.
All that said, I didn't start genealogy for real until a few years ago, after my father died. Maybe it's been my way of trying to converse with my parents again? Getting past the communication obstacles that we had when we were all alive?
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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 could have lived my life just fine without pursuing any of the hobbies I've pursued, but for me much of the pull of genealogy lies in trying to see the exact set of dynamics that made me and my family possible. I never met any of my dad's relatives, though he talked about them occasionally. I met a few of my mom's relatives, but there are lots of them, so I only met a tiny fraction of them.
As a kid, my friends always talked about visits with their grandparents, or what their niece did, or who their cousin married.... It took me a long time to figure out what a niece or cousin even was. In a way, doing genealogy as an adult was a way for me to "meet" my family. Yeah, lots of crazies in there, but you've got to meet them to know that.
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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.
Due to the family lore, I knew I had Scots-Irish and English roots. I also knew that my dad was an East Coaster and my mom was from the South, yet I grew up in a place (Silicon Valley) that was removed from those places. It was also a place more fixated on individualism, progress, and the future than on history and family ties. Doing genealogy has helped me gain a sense of "normalcy" as a person--I'm not just a careerist California boy that grew up in a little bubble, but I'm the product of mixings and migrations that are interconnected with other people. Pretty obvious stuff for some, but for me it was kind of a revelation.
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5. isn’t this a tad narcissistic?
Yes and no. Like I said, I grew up in a bubble in a place remote from even my parents' origins. In spite of that, or maybe because of that, I've been fascinated with cultures, history, and languages since childhood. And I've studied and learned all sorts of things, too. As time went by, I saw that Blacks were rediscovering their lost ancestries, that my Hispanic friends were in touch with their family past, and that Asian-Americans I knew increasingly learned their parents' and grandparents' stories.
Did I have a story, too? Or was I just another disconnected Caucasian with vague ideas about "history" and family history? California has a lot of old buildings and stuff, but much more visible are the spanking new houses and shopping centers and freeways. Was that me? Or was there more?
Was the lore passed on to me by my parents even legit? I grew up in a bubble; did my family and ancestors grow up that way, too, or were they a real part of this country's rise and development?
I don't know if "narcissism" is the correct word, but my interest in genealogy is certainly meant to connect myself with people from my past. So yeah, the "self" is involved, but it's a springboard to other people.
One thing about genealogy, at least in my experience, is actually how *humbling* it can be. If anything, it's a good antidote to narcissism.
Sure, I've found a handful of illustrious people in the tree, and I've traced back a couple of lines to medieval kings and such, but most the vast majority of my ancestors and collateral relatives were humble people--yeoman farmers, cobblers, soldiers, housewives. People who made perilous journeys across frontiers. People who fought in wars and battles both famous and obscure. People who died really young and people who lived until really old. Men who fathered many (many) children, and women who gave birth to them all.
Doing genealogy has helped me see specific features of the U.S. and World history that I've studied. It's been interesting to know, with some degree of certainty and specificity, that my family's story parallels that of so many other people. I'm not an outlier. I still live in a bit of a bubble, even as an adult, but genealogy has helped me see a true sense of belonging to the U.S. and other places.
Most people don't need these specifics--they assert their place in society with no problem. But as a gay, left-leaning, intellectual West Coast male who grew up in a sort of elite and disconnected bubble, I've often heard that I "don't belong," that I'm not "American enough," and other such piffle. Due to my disconnectedness, I haven't participated much in births, weddings, family reunions, and other things that other folks take for granted; genealogical research has helped reconnect me a little to these things.
I guess everyone gets the "Genealogy Bug" differently, if they get it at all.
In the long run, its really just a way to learn your own story; or finally get the drift of some family lore that has never really made sense to you.
It seems that ever since that movie "Roots" there has been some family search component in our national education plan, and for some people the family tale is extremely compelling with famous ancestors and lots to get excited about and thus fuel that desire to know more ; where others come by it slowly and quietly as perhaps through inheriting the "family stuff" which may include some item with a curious backstory, or perhaps ( like me) a bundle of old letters from past generations that bring about that "are you kidding?" response.
I do have fun running down a story just because I'm curious by nature. And I have had the good fortune to be on the receiving end of about 100 letters dating back to the early 1800's that contain great detail about the family in Scotland and the places they lived and how they lived in that time period. Some of the stories are very compelling and describe great hardships and heartbreaks, but there are very joyous tales as well, so if nothing else I have come to know that at least part of me comes from very resilient stock, and that suits me right down to the ground, so I won't be taking a DNA sample or any of that stuff. I'd just end up with a bad case of TMI, probably, anyway.!
And I have had the good fortune to be on the receiving end of about 100 letters dating back to the early 1800's that contain great detail about the family in Scotland and the places they lived and how they lived in that time period. Some of the stories are very compelling and describe great hardships and heartbreaks, but there are very joyous tales as well, so if nothing else I have come to know that at least part of me comes from very resilient stock, and that suits me right down to the ground, so I won't be taking a DNA sample or any of that stuff. I'd just end up with a bad case of TMI, probably, anyway.!
The story that really needs to be discussed and told is not "about the family in Scotland and the places they lived " but why so many in the world from these wonderful places got on steerage to come to a strange land. Or why Abraham (then Abram) left Ur on a trip to a more promised piece of land.
I think that migration has always had two distinct main sources: a "push" based on survival such as people escaping famine or political/ethnic/religious persecution and a "pull" based on seeking opportunities. From prehistoric times to today, people have always moved in response to one or the other of these threads. Sometimes, the push or pull can occur simultaneously depending upon the migrants' class: while Irish peasants fled the potato famine in order to survive, middle class Irishmen came to the US for better opportunities.
Welcome aboard and that is my instinct as well. I consider it an important thing for people to realize as they trash America.
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