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 found out my ancestors owned Myddleton House ( a national trust property - Carrington Bowles ) but also had ancestors who were in workhouses, were deported convicts and of the travelling community , all unknown to me so I find it fascinating .

DH and I researched ours and bought the trees together at our wedding reception and got anyone there to sign their names on the very large scroll.

DH has Huguenot ancestry and my ancestry is English and a commonwealth country. I got really far back on the English side to around 1750, we both did research in our jobs and spent a year researching but were at the stage we had to travel to look at parish records. We visited the grave of one of DH great times a few Grandads which was very surprisingly moving.

When our DC were born we inadvertently gave them their g g grandparent names - we found out much later when we started looking into our family tree. Interests like musicality, love of plants/gardening, sewing etc have all been spotted in our tree (musicians, gardeners, ag labs, needlewomen). Some of their Victorian cottage style houses are still standing (might have looked at them on rightmove 😉)
My second cousin is an author and has written successful books around the stories my gran used to tell us about growing up in their area after WW1.
My family haven't moved more than 75 miles in over 7 generations. DHs family have been much more well travelled all around the UK and overseas. Turns out one particular branch shows we're related 5 generations back!

I used to feel the same way OP but as my parents get older I find myself wanting to know more about where they came from.

This is an aspect of my PhD study- I'm looking into a female writer who was working- class and I feel that it's important to give voice to often forgotten female figures.
In my own family tree it's interesting how much easier it is to trace male rather than female relatives- men served in wars, were apprentices and appeared in newspapers more often, women were generally confined to the domestic sphere.

We've all got a Catherine Cookson novel in there somewhere.

One grandfather was an orphan by the time he was about 11. His father had been admitted to an asylum, suffering from 'melancholia'. He died from 'paralysis'. A couple of years later his widow died of cancer, in the workhouse.
The orphan went into the navy after the orphanage, and working until he was 18. He had a 'good' job when he came out of the navy. He knew me but he died when I was about 2 so I can't remember him and I have tears in my eyes as I type.

Can anyone recommend a DNA testing service? I've been looking at my family genealogy but would like to see what the DNA can prove (or disprove).

I loved doing family history research! Was amazed at how people moved around so much, to the then named Rhodesia and Gibraltar. We've a couple of ship's captains and one even discovered an island! Plus just looking at the size of families then and how so many lost children in infancy or very young, or maybe at war, one great-great died in Flanders at just 20 years old, so poignant. The sheer excitement of locating another family member or missing link! Nothing quite like it.

Ancestry. It has the largest database of other testers. You can then upload to a variety of other databases, but you can’t upload your raw dna data to Ancestry.

23andme and ancestry are both very good in different ways for identifying ancestral regions. They both tell you about your physical traits, such as muscle type and skin tone, eye colour. They both match you with relatives eg a 50% match is parent/child and help you figure out how you are related. There are family tree building services on each but ancestry requires subscriptions for much of this now.

You can’t upload raw dna files to either of these, but you can download from them for uploading to other sites. For example MyHeritage, which is less accurate but still interesting and has a growing database. MyTrueAncestry accepts files from most testing sites and compares your DNA with ancient remains. It tells you how Celtic or Roman or Thuringian or whatever you are. GEDMatch has a range of admixture tools which go deeper than ancestry or 23andme and various genealogical tools. There is a JTest to help pinpoint specific Jewish ancestry eg Seohardi, Ashkenazi, Mizrahi.

23andme: offers additional information about hereditable conditions for an extra fee. It also gives you your maternal haplogroup, and paternal if you’re male or have a male sibling/parent who has also tested with them. This is the unbroken line of mothers and daughters or fathers and offspring stretching back through an extensive time period. It tells you how much Neanderthal DNA you have and also has archaic DNA matches, similar to mytrueancestry but more limited.

Ancestry was great for me because my parents were both American with some precolonial roots. It gets better year by year but I don’t know how useful it is for Europeans. At the moment it has a trait comparison tool which you can use to measure your inherited athletic traits against major Olympians which is fun. It doesn’t provide ethnicity estimates anymore but rather ancestral journeys, tracing the migrations of your ancestors over the past three or four hundred years and ancestral regions which are narrowed down to states and county levels. It still displays the results in terms of 25% Japan, 10% South China, 8% Germanic Europe though.

I've been researching mine for years now as a hobby and have got back as far as my 18th grandparents - I've found so many surprises and it answers some questions that have been in our family.
I've discovered that my Nanna had a secret sister, I've discovered that I have a lot of Royal great+ grandparents from worldwide royalty (not that great as I'm not a Royalist and never have been) as well as other aristocratic families (and here was little old me, growing up on a Council Estate with a divorced single mum - just a little dig at the anti-council-estate people there) and recently I was amazed to discover that I have American-Indian chieftains who are also in my direct line on my paternal grandmother's side, yet I am extremely pale skinned, blue eyed and pale blonde.

I've had my DNA done and I make sure that I cross-reference everything I can to sift out mistakes and it can just be fun for some people.

I'm handwriting all of my finding in a series of notebooks (a book for each line of grandparents from each parent - so now I'm doing "My 18th Grandparents on my Paternal Grandmother's Maternal side" and these are going to be a legacy for my nephews and nieces - my 15 year old nephew is already really interested and sometimes we investigate together which bonds us further).

Different people find different things interesting. I love learning about my family history and have all my life, it’s helped me learn more about myself too.

I just find it all fascinating.

My curiosity started when we went to register my Great Grandmother's death and was told we must have made a mistake with her details as that person died at 5 years old.

Not a common thing, but it was also my family tree that helped me stand up against my ex when he wanted single vaccines for our DDs. As soon as I read they weren't as effective I went against him as doing my tree I'd learned about my gr-gr granny who had lost 8 of her 10 children to measles.

I love the stories of people. There were 4 brothers on my tree who went off to America looking for a new life. They ended up 2 coming home to the UK, one staying and one going to Canada. The families ended up with very different lives and fortunes!

What hobbies and pastimes do you have @excelen ?

I started tracing my family tree because a consultant oncologist wanted to know what my parents, grandparents and aunts/uncles had all died of. There was a concern that I may have inherited a particular cancer gene, and since all my relatives were already dead by that time, the only way to do it was by tracing my family tree.

@excelen Is that a good enough reason for you?

I started mine as I was struggling at uni and was trying to work out if I was just procrastinating. I'm suspected no so it all makes sense now.

Then I got sick and it extended to seeing if there was a genetic link.
Then we started doing little trips around the uk to ancestral places. I was told a pack of lies by my grandma and had lost my other 3 grandparents by age 9. Some of the lies soon became apparent and it gave us impetus to dig further.

We've been to Ireland a few times too as got Irish Catholic roots, was interesting to touch the font where my great great grandfather was christened.

Still not managed New Zealand yet but have ancestors who were the first settlers there. My grandma's cousin is 99 and although now in poor health was a great to connect many years ago.

It's not everyone's cup of tea but it's been an interesting journey for me.

Why wouldnt you be interested?

Epigenetics is so important, it's who you are. You can't escape your genes.

I don't really get it either tbh but my
Mother is obsessed and gets upset when I don't share her enthusiasm.

However the use of DNA means we've discovered her dad wasn't her dad after all and actually she has 8 Siblings on her bio dad's side that we never knew existed (plus the 6 on her mums side we did).

Ancestry by a country mile though the downside is they are increasingly charging for additional services.

What an interesting thread!

@CrunchyCarrot If you're interested in the life of a Royal Navy Captain in the early 1800s, and you've not yet discovered them, the Aubrey/Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian are a good read. They are based mainly on Captain's logs and diaries, and have quite a bit about navigation too.

I'm so impressed by discovering an island! It wasn't Inaccessible Island was it?

Ooh that sounds interesting thank you! Actually one tale was quite upsetting, several generations back, my great-great GF was a ship's captain and his crew mutinied, throwing him into the brig. He had brain damage and died 4 months after being back on shore, my great granny never knew her father as a result, she was just an infant at the time. Very sad. I've no idea what the mutiny was about, any records I have found haven't said, but goes to show things were brutal back then.

As for the other island discovery, it was the Cocos-Keeling islands! Wikipedia mentions the discovery back in 1609!

Although my GF and uncle were both keen sailors, I have not inherited the interest and prefer the sea to stay 'out there' thank you very much! 😅

what a shock. Different humans have different interests and hobbies.

How fascinating @CrunchyCarrot ! But how very sad for the Captain's poor family. The punishment for mutiny was death or severe punishments such as keel hauling, I wonder if the mutineers were ever caught!
I'll read up on those islands. Thanks for sharing!

"It tells you how Celtic or Roman or Thuringian or whatever you are. " yes, a German family member (who has a black wife) said that most of those websites essentially aid white Europeans confirm their whiteness and aryan status. They are awash on the continent with nationalists trying to confirm their Northern European heritage. I like that chap, he calls a spade a spade