Family Tree

So over the years, I have occasionally shown interest in how various family members connect to one another, but generally my occasional interest was limited to an isolated conversation with my parents, or maybe, during an especially energetic phase, emailing with a few relatives who were known to know about these things, maybe writing down a few things, and hearing a story or two. I knew my family on both sides had been mapped out pretty extensively (the advantage of them mostly having roots in the same country), but I had never caught the proverbial genealogy bug.

Until now.

Consider this fair warning: if you are a virgo, or you have a latent hunter-gatherer / collector / lego builder / librarian-archivist / list-maker / Candy Crush or Pokemon player or some similar OCD predisposition, genealogy can become an all-consuming thing. Before you know it, you spend hours digging to find the wedding date and location of some long-dead person you had never heard of until today, or you end up continuing to dig because a baptism record is not quite a good-enough approximation for birth date for someone who has been dead for 300 years. 

According to my source of all wisdom (ChatGPT), genealogy ranks as one of the most popular pastimes, second only to gardening. 

While there are similarities (both being never-ending until you give up, which I suppose is a good thing in a hobby), the main similarity is that both are time sinks that may get you an occasional sympathetic "wow" from a polite but fundamentally disinterested relative. And it may very quickly turn you into "that guy," the person who is a little too eager to talk about their thing. So you better enjoy it for its own sake, not as a family/community service or to get the attaboy.

The similarities stop there, pretty much. Nobody in their right mind would contact distant relatives and ask them to come do work in their garden, or even look at it; not so the amateur genealogist. 

And whereas gardening may involve some digging, generally that is limited (no need to dig all the way to China to plant this year's tomatoes). Not so the genealogist; dig and dig further we shall.

While gardening is never-ending, it is definitely self-limiting, generally by how much land you have available for you (in my part of the world, despite it originally being all orchards, extremely so). At some point, your garden is fully planted, and fully weeded, and watered, and fertilized, and dead-headed and pruned, and you just have to sit back and enjoy it. Sure, in about a day or two you can do most of those things again, but for now, you are done. If that's not the case, you are not gardening, you are farming, or inefficient, or both.

There is no "done" in genealogy. 

It is exponential and close to infinite in scope. Like that grains-of-rice-on-a-chessboard story, you can collapse the earth on the weight of your ancestors if you go back enough generations. Moreover, that exponential number of direct ancestors each has a number of descendants that (on average) tracks population growth, and they are all (kind of) related to you. So even though today's OECD fertility rates help, roughly everybody who has ever lived on the planet is related to you. 

So it becomes a matter of imposing boundaries: How much ancestry is enough ancestry? Once you get past a few hundred years, unless you run into an unexpectedly rich vein ("Wow, a duke!!"), you tend to get stuck in some town with decent municipal or church records, and everyone was a fisherman or a miller or a farm hand, and the names tend to oscillate between generations (like a periodic sequence in math: 0,1,0,1,..., where ... is math for: "we can keep going but you get it, who cares").

Speaking of boundaries: How about in-laws, are their families your family as well? Not covering them is at best a bit dick-ish. And a cousin to what degree is no longer really a relative? And those ancestors somewhere in the 1800s who had twelve children, do we really want to track all of them, and their spouses, and all their offspring?

There are multiple approaches to boundaries, all to limit exponential scope:

• Historically, the limiting was done either by name or by gender. It's quite brutal: the moment you have an ancestor or a descendant with a different name, the official family sources stop caring—it's someone else's problem. This particularly sucks for women, as they tended to lose their name when they married. Yeah, her seven kids? Don't care. Someone else's problem. Different family. And the same in that different family, when they married into it: Yeah, her grandparents? Don't care. Someone else's problem. Different family.
• The Jews, of course, went the other way around. Father? Don't care. Was it, really? We follow only the maternal line, like mitochondrial DNA.
• My approach is more self-centered. It comes down to:
  • Start with the people known to me as "actual" relatives (seeded by those earlier discussions with parents and family, and going back, roughly, at most three generations, plus anyone I have ever heard about as aunt or uncle such-and-such, where the aunt and uncle part was not just an honorific)
  • All their direct descendants are family and are potentially in scope (unless they are too prolific in their propagation, or too hard to find), plus their partners and then maybe back up a generation or two (this may get much bigger if I think someone actually cares)
  • All their direct ancestors are family and are potentially in scope, up to a point (for some, this may be as little as another generation; for others, I may dig back 500 years)
  • I don't go back down other branches of descendants of those ancestors, unless they lead to someone already in the starting set, or except for the following:
  • If I run into someone who might be related and they are somewhat interesting (e.g. there is a boat or a museum named after them), then the shortest path from them to someone who actually was already known to be family is also in scope
  • Besides all that, I may occasionally rathole and map out a whole area that does not follow any of these rules

Ignoring the fact that the basic reason for most hobbies is that it's fun (think gardening, not farming), it is tempting to revisit the existential insecurity: What's the point of all this work? I recently read a Reddit post by an amateur genealogist who had just encountered that polite disinterest I mentioned earlier. They wondered, despite liking the research and discovering stories, what would be the point of continuing. They worried, brilliantly, that no one else will care about this like they have. 

I felt a flash of recognition. The insecurity that nobody wants your heirlooms. All those cool things you have accumulated, each with a story and a history of their own - Goodwill? Estate sale? Dumpster? 

I have no illusions that anyone will care about my family tree if we enter another barbarian age where the library of Alexandria burns or drowns; I would be surprised if the servers of MyHeritage will survive a few bad quarters, let alone war, revolution, or disaster. But in the meantime, the comments to the Reddit post reminded me of a few reasons to do it. I quote:

• I still do it, because I’m still interested in it. The second it’s not interesting to me, I stop.
• Somewhere down the line someone will care and appreciate your work. It may not be your direct descendant or even in your lifetime, but it will happen.
• You're planting the seeds for future generations to research, even if it's a few decades after you pass away.
• I recommend putting it on the internet. Add photos and scans, included photos of items. Make them come alive with stories you remember and little anecdotes.

As I am reading, and copying, these comments, I smile. I recently found an email from my Dad from almost a decade ago, in which he talks about his second cousin who suddenly passed away. At the time, I had no idea who this cousin was. Since then, I have run into him all over the place, in particular through an enormous family tree, as well as lots of photos and stories about relatives, which he put on multiple sites (Geneanet, MyHeritage) and from which I got a ton of interesting information.

I now feel so grateful for all the work he did. 

And a bit sad that I never got to know him, or tell him. 

But encouraged that the work we do may be found, and appreciated, some day.

Even if nobody is interested today.