Why do people research their genealogy/family tree?

[excelen]

My brother is obsessed with researching our ancestry. I couldn’t care less, they’re almost always dead… we come from a long line of lower middle class farmers. How exciting.

Why do people research it?

I understand that some people like to leave the past behind.

I have been unwell. I have few surviving members of my family alive.

I wanted to research if anyone else had my condition. As prevention measures can be placed for further generations.

I find it absolutely fascinating.

I suddenly got the urge to start researching it after my grandmother died and I regretted not having asked her more questions while she was still alive. I now know far more about her ancestry than she did.

I know that a lot of things we previously believed about the family weren't true. For example, my grandmother's father was Australian and we all thought their whole family had been wiped out in the Spanish flu epidemic and the sister he had been visiting in London when he met his wife was the only family he had left. I've since found out that he was actually the youngest child of a Jewish/Christian couple who were both cut off by their parents for not marrying within their own religion, that they went off to Tasmania and had six children before finally marrying once their parents had died, and that the children were eventually dispersed between Australia, South Africa and the UK but kept in touch and even visited each other fairly regularly despite being on three continents and it only being the turn of the 20th century. As far as I can tell no one died in the flu epidemic. My grandmother's mother was supposedly Welsh but I now know that she actually had no Welsh blood at all but was the child of a cockney and a very middle class German who went to London to make his fortune. I still don't know what happened to him because he disappeared off the grid (his wife then went to Wales and married her third husband, almost certainly bigamously), but I've managed to trace his ancestors back for centuries in Germany.

I don't know why I find it so fascinating. I think part of it is that I would love to have been a detective and this is a very satisfying way of solving mysteries without committing any crimes or putting myself in danger! I can spend ages obsessed about finding out more about a particular branch of the family tree and I find it so satisfying when I have a breakthrough. I suppose the likelihood that some of these people somewhere along the line were not actually fathered by the man named on their birth record, and so they aren't actually my real ancestors, is fairly high. But I don't tend to think about that.

When researching family history in the last 200 years or so there's often enough information to put together a fairly detailed picture of how these families lived and what happened to them. For example, my great great great great grandmother gave birth to stillborn twins and then married less than three weeks later. I don't know whether her husband was the father of her twins or whether her parents took advantage of the fact that her babies had died to get her quickly married off to someone else. But when I think back to my own wedding day, I can't imagine how different it must have been to get married when you're still an emotional and physical mess from giving birth to stillborn twins a couple of weeks previously. She then had another stillborn daughter and then a son who only lived seven months, at which point she and her husband moved to the other end of the country. I imagine her as a 30 year old woman who had given birth to four babies and yet was still childless, wanting a fresh start and moving to a completely new place. She eventually had at least three surviving sons, but no more daughters as far as I can tell. I wonder how she felt about not getting to raise a daughter.

These are all stories of people whose lives were just as interesting as mine is to me, and learning about them means they aren't forgotten. Sometimes they were forgotten but my research has in a way brought them back to life again, through random records uncovered in improbable corners of the internet.

Then when you get back to even earlier generations, it's mostly just baptisms, marriages and burials, but it still gives me a thrill when I manage to go back one generation further and tell myself that this person with this fairytale name (Maudlin Grimault, anyone?) I found in this very old book in almost indecipherable script was, unless someone had an affair with the milkman, one of my direct ancestors.

Because I was an only child . Now both parents dead , no real extended family .
Yes , most research is about dead ancestors , but I've been in contact with a few live ones .

Since I found out I have ancestors who died in World War 2, I want not only to remember them but ensure they are not forgotten.

Originally it was family mysteries that fascinated me when I was little; my granddad grew up in a children’s home so couldn’t tell me his grandparents names - I just couldn’t understand that as a kid. And little snippets of interesting knowledge like a great-grandmother I remembered meeting had been sent away to live with family when her mother died suddenly and another great-grandfather had been born in Canada.

I absolutely love it all, I’ve been researching ours for around 20 years now. It’s just a giant puzzle, I find it really satisfying when I find something new that we didn’t know about. From the examples above - I went on to my grandfathers family back to the 1700’s and we took him to look around the churchyard in the village they came from (5 miles away, not from a distant part of England like his mother had claimed), he absolutely loved that as he’d always wondered to know more. I found out the great-grandmother sent away from London after her mother died, her mother died suddenly while working in a factory during WWI and her father remarried to her mother’s sister a year later - family lore conveniently left that bit out. Sadly they never did take her back to live with them. And the Canadian side is actually Irish and German!

More recently I’ve been piecing things together with DNA, I helped an adoptee connection figure out where they fit in (a great aunt had a baby no one knew about), and I’ve filled in some of the unknown fathers from illegitimate ancestors lines where no record of the father was given. My nan did a DNA test for me and it turns out her mystery grandfather was part French which is amazingly exotic for her rural Hertfordshire side. She hates the French so I haven’t dared tell her, but my Mum and I are delighted by it!

My family are largely a bit bewildered and humour me about badgering them constantly for stories and to spit in tubes for DNA tests!!

There are worse hobbies 🤷‍♀️

It’s fascinating. Absolutely fascinating. It has brought a lot of sense to the present and it has helped in practical ways.

What a lovely thread OP has started. I had a g g g grandmother who was the wife of what I guess would be a lower-middle-class farmer. One day in the 1860s she went from her home, about 3/4 miles away from me, to the local town, where I'll go today or tomorrow. She registered the deaths of her grand-daughter, from cholera, and her brother-in-law, from bronchitis. She signed with a cross.
I expect she could do all sorts of domestic work, even if she had a servant, and knew how to manage a household, but she couldn't write, or not well enough to sign her name. I am not banging any drum. That's how it was.
What did she wear? Did she nip into a hat shop while she was up in town? Did she take herself there in a little buggy or was she taken there, sitting next to her husband or a farm servant? If her husband went, did he go to do other errands while she went to the registrar?
What was their marriage like? Was he a good farmer?

The pictures are endless. The questions are endless.
Sorry, OP, this ought to go into Mumsnet History, but it explains why it is so fascinating for some of us.

Because I didn't know my family history and despite being told I came from a large family, there was little contact with relatives. There were also lots of family stories being passed down that I wondered about so I set out to explore where I came from. I've now made contact with 2nd cousins who I didn't know existed and have found relatives in Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada. It has been amazing but it has also been sad. Many of my predecessors lived tough lives, some were in workhouses, some died from the Spanish Flu, others died in the wars, one was captured by the Germans in WW2 and one was a convict. I also discovered that I have Welsh ancestry with some of my mums descendants moving from Wales into the Midlands in the 1800s. It has been a fascinating journey but an emotional one.

OP's daft question has turned into a brilliant thread.

Lots of you have articulated what I enjoy about researching my family history. I'll add that you can tell some amazing stories - all from the comfort of your sofa. My very ordinary family has some corkers.

I recently inherited my grandads birth certificate in among my mums things. Turns out he was born in the house in the next road to where I grew up.

Two interesting things as it also means my great grandparents had moved into brand new council houses as they couldn't have been built long in the 1920's.

I can’t understand anyone who has no interest in finding out about where they have come from and who their ancestors are. Who they are is what’s made you. It’s shaped your health, wealth and the and social situation you find yourself in today. Even down to the things you are good at or the decisions you make.
Its fascinating.
Really don’t get anyone who has 0 interest in history and I do often find people who have no interest fairly shallow thinkers

I disagree! My research has made a difference to my family!

I'm a very intermittent researcher: something I picked up when breastfeeding my oldest and immobilised for long periods.

1. I'm interested in history and how ordinary people lived. Following my family tree and also those of people that I have wondered about has given me a thread to follow.
2. Family stuff: my family was a bit fucked up and weird. I found out a lot of things that gave it all context and some things made sense that were a puzzle before.

Some highlights: found my dad had an older half sister he'd never known about. (My grandfather was in lifelong disgrace with his family- this would be why.)

Two houses I'd felt an odd connection and curiosity about turned to have been family homes about 4 generations back. One in a very remote village where friends of mine ended up living, another in the East End of London. Spooky!

A mysterious family friend who used to come and stay occasionally and was very English eccentric turned out to have been living under an assumed name. In fact, he was a Jewish Italian refugee who would have seen terrible things as a boy. His father, rather than being an impoverished aristocrat with a 'living' as a minister, was a Polish businessman who died in Auschwitz just before the war ended.

Lastly, my aunts' father's family. My grandma was widowed within about 6 years of being married. Her husband worked on the engines of boats in the Merchant Navy, and he had died in Shanghai allegedly. She was left with two small children to raise. He was Irish but I'd wondered why my Aunties had never spoken about visiting Irish family and there was no support at all from that side. Turned out the kids were all orphaned (5 kids I think) in a very dramatic murder suicide which was a very big news story at the time. The kids were all farmed out to extended family: by the time he joined the Navy as a teen he wasn't even 5 foot tall, but obviously got enough food to catch up a bit after a few years. Since then I've wondered whether my Aunties knew about this, but they're dead now so I can hardly ask them.

I try to remember, though, that it's really just luck whether you find anything. There is so much that isn't, and can't be recorded in a census. Like the time grandad went to the park looking for a pervert while wearing a dress (thinking the perve might try to target him... with his handlebar moustache) or great granny the nurse trying to stop doctors from giving her husband treatment that would kill him (don't worry your pretty little head dear) and then watching him die.

Sorry, didn't mean to write an essay! 😂

It is absolutely fascinating. I come from a line of people who hardly ventured outside their village until suddenly a name appeared which was utterly outside the normal ones. It was amazing what we could find out.

I also love the fact how many children were born less than 9 months after the wedding.

This May we went to a WWI cemetry in France to find two relatives. That was actually a humbling experience.

Because it's fascinating!

I was able to give my 98 year old granddad contact with his family (three aunts) who emigrated to Canada when he was a little boy. He had no idea what had happened to them and I was so pleased to gift him the knowledge (and photos etc!) that they had been happy and safe and had lived good lives.

Digging deeper into the past has now armed me with brilliant/sad/wild stories about my ancestors. We have a wealthy lawyer in the 1500s who came from an influential family in Staffordshire with links to royalty, Irish light house keepers, a young woman who was murdered in the courtyard of her family's fishmongers and a chap whose dire approach to politics changed the law on appointing officials 😂

I did my Dads side because it seemed more interesting.

My mum has done hers and it’s so yawn listening to it all but it makes her happy.

I think I was hoping to find new and exciting family because mine do my head in 😂

….. and we did! We found 1st cousins and have no idea how they’re connected to us. It’s very amusing knowing someone somewhere had a naughty affair!

I've been researching for forty years. It started with conversations with my gran and a lifelong interest in social history.

Both my mum's parents grew up in terrible poverty and I've uncovered so many secrets and lies. I've got an enormous family and am more interested in the last 150 years and sideways branches rather than going back a long way.

DNA has added another dimension and disproved a lot of what I was told.

Because it's interesting. I found out things that were never told me about quite close relatives. Such as, dad's oldest brother was actually his half brother. His mum gave birth before marriage and the father was not her husband. Another uncle was a deserter in WW1, which explains lots of things about his subsequent life. My other grandmother's 1st husband died of syphilis in the ' mad house'. She was carrying on with the lodger and was pregnant by him when 1st husband died. My dad's family all the way back pre Reformation were religious dissenters and joined some really weird sects. Oh, another one, we were wealthy until the Civil War. We backed what was the right side, which became the wrong side. Land, money taken back. Bloody Cavaliers!
And it goes on and on.
I find it interesting, hilarious and it actually answered questions about why people behaved so strangely.

Because it's fascinating and helps me see how my own ancestors fitted into history. It brings history to life.

Why your disdain for it? Nobody is holding a gun to your head and forcing you to do it.

You're right in one observation though - it's history and the main participants are dead. That is normal. It doesn't mean that their stories aren't interesting or shouldn't be told.

@NewGreenDuck which asylum? Mine did and I managed to get the records!

@OnlyFrench I got his records from his army records. He died in 1917 having re enlisted but was found to have 3rd stage syphilis and died in the asylum in Portsmouth. He had quite a sad life, he was in the workhouse as a child and joined the army at 14. Clearly the boys were given a choice as to how to get out and he chose the army. He was sent to all sorts of places, India, Malta, Egypt, Gibraltar. Probably his undoing. In addition my grandmother seems to have been cut off by her family after their marriage.

A similar story, even down to the cutting off. I've messaged you.

I'm interested in family and community history, the aspect of history often overlooked, particularly women's roles. I researched not to give me a sense of belonging but to understand how and why branches of the family ended up where they did. One interesting story is that my Maternal Nan's family worked on the Sandringham Estates and had to move as they were living on the edges of poverty and ended up in the NE Mines!

Being artistic, I have always had the urge to carve wood . Researching my family tree I found out that my GGF was a Journey man Master Carver . Also if you can afford it , death certificates in your direct line can show up recurring health problems, such as heart desiese .