AIBU not be at all interested in genealogy?

[Tedsshed]

Several members of my family, now that they're retired and need a project, have been charting our family tree. I've just had a conversation with one of them who's recently discovered that our great-great-great grandfather was a watchmaker. This is treated as if it's fascinating stuff and apparently explains why one of the current little grandsons has a fascination with Mecchano. I cooed and said how interesting and well done, as required, but I really don't care.

I have a friend who's adopted and is part of what turned out to be a huge Irish family where the predominant mood seems to have been one of misery and deprivation and escape to a better life. Famine, emigration, rape, illegitimate children given away, squalid deaths, lonely lives in the Australian outback, alcoholism, learning difficulties... I can understand wanting to know your family origins if you're adopted, but tracing new members of the family has become a bit of an obsession for her. She's now arranging meet-ups with people who are only very tangentially related. In fact she went to the US to meet one man she thought was a third cousin, only for it to turn out that he was someone who happened to share his name with the person she was looking for.

You only have to watch a few episodes of Who Do You Think You Are? to know that most of us come from very ordinary folk who've left very little mark behind. We'll never know what they were really like or what really motivated most of them. Maybe if one of my ancestors turned out to have done something heroic in the Napoleonic wars, or if one of my female relatives had been a Suffragette I'd want to find out more. But no. Apart from one branch that moved from Glasgow to London in the 19th century, all of them stayed in East Anglia or the South East all their lives and that's where they are now.

Am I the only person in the world who can't get excited about genealogy?

One had a baby without a husband...

only one? @Meadowfinch is dead posh

It's fine that you don't think it's interesting. It's fine that lots of people do. We're all different!

I loved doing ours, most were soldiers or farmers.

Best I found was my Dad's grandmother. My Grandmother always held her up as a fine example of a Victorian gentle woman. She had 3 children out of wedlock, leaving two in the workhouse and finally marrying her boss ( she was a housemaid) just after his first wife died and had a baby two months later.

Bit of a girl.

I did a little research and found that some of the stories we had been told on my mother's side were not true. One of my uncles was pretty annoyed with me. He preferred the made up stuff.

My dad's ancestors included a couple who were hauled before the church for "antenuptial fornication". This was a big deal back in the day. It was really designed to persuade the man to agree to marry his pregnant girlfriend so the parish wasn't left responsible for mother and baby. I hadn't heard of it before.

I found passenger lists of ships bound for Canada and the US, army records. A lot of it is a connection to history generally, not just to the family.

I'm not interested either

But I do find people are quite critical if you say that. As if we are under some kind of obligation to be fascinated by our lineage. I might be if there was a chance of inheriting Downton Abbey or something. But no.

Each to their own and if research into family history brings someone joy then great for them.

personally find it hard to deal with the family I have that I know of let alone wondering about the past .

don’t care a jot about what my great great great grandfather did or didn’t do.

so many people are into it and good for them - but absolutely not for me.

There was a thread started a few months ago by someone who hated football and I was right there for it🤣🤣

I wasn’t interested until my brother discovered that we are 4th cousins to Daniel Craig. That was quite interesting.

One of Dad's second cousins has compiled a family tree back to the late 1600s which show us to be solidly middle class schoolmasters and mill managers. No surprises there except a first cousin marriage, oops! I would be slightly interested to know if the tall tales of my mother's family were true, but I suspect it would be a tale of sad workhouse motherless bairns, and the rumours of a black man or gypsy great great grandfather were just romances and not true.

Might change as you get older. I wouldn’t have been interested years ago, but as you lose family members and you realise you have more years behind you than ahead there’s sometimes a wish to see how your small life fits amidst the larger family tree. Anyway, I genuinely find other people’s mostly interesting to hear about.

I find it interesting. None of my ancestors did anything remotely interesting and were all peasants. I did find some old photographs from the 1800s though of quite a few of them which was pretty cool. I love reading the census as well but maybe I am weird.

I don’t understand all the fuss around Wimbledon

Thanks for the responses. A penny has dropped for me. Clearly all the research and going to records offices and visiting out-of-the-way churches looking for records and graves is interesting for those involved. But for the rest of us, the news that in 1896 our great grandfather moved from Shoreditch to Fulham is not likely to be of interest, nor the revelation that great-great Uncle Toby was a postman.

The research process is interesting. The outcome usually isn't.

I agree with you although for a different reason. It all pins on people being related to who they believe to be their family. All it takes is one affair/rape and its covered up and everything you think is absolute bollocks.

Me too! I can feel my eyes glaze over, whenever my Uncle says he found out we are descended from the welsh.Lovely country ,for a holiday yes but no spiritual connection for me.

Listen to a lot of DNA surprises type podcasts and I always feel so sorry for the people who diligently put together their many-generations-back family trees only to find out they are really the son of the postman and the whole thing is inaccurate. Commercial DNA testing is a minefield and a game changer for all sorts of family secret stuff.

I took a DNA test during lockdown to find my ancestry , did the same for dh.
He was interested to see the results , but that was it .
I took up a subscription with them , and like your family members have been fascinated with the results with a few interesting people & facts have come to light .
I enjoyed doing it but I wouldn't then expect others around me to be the least bit interested .

I say this quite a lot on these kind of threads.

As you go back, you get more and more people appearing on the tree - at what point does it become meaningless?

4 grand parents
8 great grand parents
16 great great grand parents
32 great great great grand parents

I did go back to the great grand parents and found some great great grand parents Vaguely interesting but there does start to be a lot of them

There was a cousin of Daniel's living in Liverpool. He looked like a smaller version of him. It was funny seeing people in cars and getting on the bus, do a double/triple take.
I was interested because I'm from immigrant background. I had more connection to Liverpool than I realised and did have relatives serve on the UK's side in WW1 and 2. There's areas of the city I've felt better in, than others and during the 17/18th century, my family had lived there. Where they actually lived no longer exists. I think that it would have helped me growing up when I felt very different and we suffered racism.

I had a relative who became obsessed after WDYTYA came out and would talk about it endlessly. They bought me the series book and then kept asking me if I had watched it, done some research.
Never watched the programme , book went to charity shop. Great if you are interested in something but you can’t make others interested.

Also when I had my first baby in 1985, I wondered why older people thought it was normal to give birth anytime from seven months. Seeing all the seven month births after marriage, on the records, the penny drops.

During the 17th / 18th century, your family lived there?

How many people alive in the 17th / 18th century would be on your family tree ?

That is a lot of generations - so what do you mean by "your family".

Even going back 10 generations, that is 2 to the power of 10, which is 1024 people

Funnily enough my ex who did turn out to be a narcissist and abusive did his family tree to way back, and found that his GGG grandfather had murdered his wife, exs father was also an abuser. Not sure it’ll that’s genetic or generational trauma following through but seems there’s was abuse against women all the way down the line.