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Comment by anitil | Hacker News Reader

Outside of religious concerns for LDS, I'd be interested to hear why people are interested in their family trees.

I know one or two anecdotes about my grandparents' parents but have no real interest in learning more about them. Perhaps I am too young to understand the appeal, or perhaps it's a cultural thing?

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Genealogists tend to be an older crowd for sure, for a mix of reasons. I'm just entering middle age, so I can only speak for myself. I remember as a very small boy doing an elementary school family history project and finding it captivating. There were people I had never met but played an important role in determining who I was and the family culture I grew up in. To me, that is just inherently fascinating, and I have a hard time understanding people who don't feel that way (even though almost no one I know shares this passion, including my closest friends and family members). I think most genealogists have a similar experience. We end up finding 4th cousins who we are are very tangentially related to, but we bond over our shared interest in our ancestors and the process of genealogy research.

For me, genealogy is almost a perfect fit for my skills and interests: I believe strongly in the importance of family, I enjoy history and geography, I am trained as a lawyer so I can decipher the many legal documents that lead to important details, I enjoy the detective work involved in cracking hard cases, I enjoy the sense of completion of filling in a new branch on the tree, I enjoy writing and sharing my research with family members, I'm a skeptical person and have good critical reasoning skills, so I can spot a lot of errors in other people's research and try to correct them. Perhaps most of all, I enjoy learning about the lives of my ancestors. I feel that telling their story honors them and keeps their memory alive, and that's important to me. I hope some day my descendants will enjoy reading my work.

There are some people who get the bug for genealogy and get really into it, and maybe that helps explain why.

This is almost the perfect answer I was hoping for. I think I understand a lot better now what the draw is.

To answer your question of motivation/appeal to know more about your grandparents' parents (and beyond), here is one data point - I grew up hearing that my mother was related to the Alsatian polymath Albert Schweitzer (1) and I've wanted to see exactly how we are related. Also I've heard family stories that on my father's side, his grandfather's surname was changed upon entry at the massive Ellis Island immigration facility (2) and I wanted to know more about our previous family name and history back in Sweden.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Albert_Schweitzer

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ellis_Island

That's an interesting perspective, thanks.

I've done quite a lot of family research and I'm fairly young (I think????) being just 30.

I'm somewhat of a history buff and while History generally happens through some great event, big time general or king or the like. history with a small h happens through the people simply living their lives.

I live in Sweden and the records we have available are extensive enough from say mid 1700s and onward to give you glimpses into my relatives life. I can reconstruct a story of how my great-great-great-granparents met while both working on the same farm, eventually moving into their own farmstead and later having children.

I can see how one of my relatives _really_ didn't want to be in the military since he fled three times, eventually the military just gave up in collecting him the third time.

Or how one of my relatives moved to America to make a new life for himself.

To me it really brings history within touching distance and makes it more human.

I considered using Gramsps because I have a big family and I am not good with names. I was not interested in tracking back my family many generations, just understanding who was who among all of my living family members, even those I would only see once a year or less frequently.

That's an interesting use! For similar reasons I considered building a little CRM utility just to keep track of acquaintances

I'm also doing the same! Started out as a generic "Contacts" database with phones, emails, birthdays, etc. but evolved into an RDF store with a lot of connections between individuals like "X is-parent-of Y", "A married B on this date and location", etc. etc.

I did too! But just like the Gramps idea, I soon abandoned it.

It’s fun, it’s like solving a puzzle. You get to play detective.

For me getting in to genealogy was a two week thing, I found all relatives 4-5 generations back. After that I got bored. Sometimes it’s fun when 23andme finds someone that I am related to and I get to figure out in which way.

This is just a subset of people who do it, but I've seen some people in fairly spiritual/esotericist circles get into genealogy. It seemed like some of them were hoping to find answers to some issues they were struggling with in their family history.

Apparently in some schools of thought from that area there is a lot of focus on family relationships and the fate of one's ancestors and how those may affect people across generations. I feel like newer generations tend to take more of an individualistic/"blank slate" view of their heritage, whereas I've encountered a lot of older people who gave much more thought/weight to where their ancestry came from and things that happened generations ago.

Some people like it, some people don't, and there's no issue with that. I second the other comment about how it is like solving mysteries, with a combination of trying to get to know people that you've never met and can never meet.

> I know one or two anecdotes about my grandparents' parents

One thing you can find is that those anecdotes aren't correct. We have some family lore around my grandfather and something he did in the service. However, in reviewing military records for his unit and his own diary after he passed away, it's likely (in my opinion) that he was exaggerating quite a bit, if not outright fabricating things. Humans are funny creatures :)

My interest was driven by coming across some family tree research my paternal great-grandmother and great-great grandmother did 100 years ago. I wanted to bring it up today's genealogical standards, if only to help out my childrens' children.

Many of stories I've found are gut wrenching and brand new to me, as in never spoken by any living generation, and yet, generations persisted after that event.

So, to me, it's a kind of very unique resilience that can be told only through dusting off your own family tree.

Inherited medical conditions is another potential interest - although accuracy of diagnoses do degrade the further back you go.

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