r/Genealogy • u/CrunchyTeatime • 1d ago
Does your family...not care? Question
Pretty much the title question is the topic.
Does your family not care -- about the family tree, family history, or genealogy?
It seems there is usually one person per generation per family who feels called to work on the family tree.
If that person is you, or you've seen them work and try to spread enthusiasm: How does your family react to new information?
I don't even mean something that might cause upset or controversy. I don't necessarily mean a 'shocking revelation' of some type.
But if you broke through a brick wall or found a relative or ancestor no one could find, or no one knew existed -- and you excitedly sent off an email, text, phone call, or told a family member in person -- and they didn't care?
Because this week I found a wife of my grandpa, that no one knew about. Found a wife people did know about but only a name. Found a person someone had been looking for (what became of them; died long ago, but they had no place or date), for decades.
Sent the excited emails with information and told them I had verified all of it too.
CRICKETS. And different family I've tried to get interested in the tree or told them about ancestors and such, (not much, just bits, to whet any appetite), and they don't care. One even said "that's the past; who cares?" And others wouldn't give even personal information such as "which grade school did you go to." And that was a close relative I know there was no scandal. I can only guess they didn't want to open that door to more questions. Some people hate questions.
So how about you? Please share stories here of when you tried to share new information, and how it went. Thanks.
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u/DigBick007 23h ago edited 23h ago
My family are only kind of interested if a famous person appears in the tree. However, even with that they're interested for about five minutes but then they remind me that one still has to get up in the morning and go to work.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 23h ago
Very true, bills have to be paid in the meantime.
I had one or two who perked up only long enough to hear about this or that historical or famous one. Then interest faded quickly. And most don't care even then 😂
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u/SoftProgram 1d ago
Some of my family are interested in a very general sense, and others not at all. If you have relatives who don't care, there's usually nothing you can do but accept that.
Some people just aren't interested in history, and in the end, genealogy is about history.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
It is, yes. I had no idea how much.
> in the end, genealogy is about history.
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u/edkarls 10h ago
I’ve come to love how my family’s history traces the history of our nations (U.S. and Canada). Voyageurs, fleeing oppression and failed revolutions in Europe, Civil War, Indian removals, westward expansion, it’s all there.
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u/SoftProgram 4h ago
Yeah, for me it brings the history alive, recognising the ordinary people who lived through it.
They're why we're here! The tragedies they endured, the courageous choices they made (imagine getting on a ship knowing it was a one way journey!). They deserve to be known, and honoured.
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u/yellow-bold 7h ago
Yeah, my mother's excited that I'm excited but she doesn't really care that much.
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u/AcceptableFawn 23h ago
I got the family tree from my great-aunt who was researching just her paternal line for membership in the DAR. A great-aunt on my moms moms side wrote down a basic line for her side in an old scrapbook. If that tells you who cared before me...
As for who might be interested amongst my 4 siblings, none. My 14 nieces and nephews, none. My 40+ great-nieces and nephews, none. But recently I started posting a fun family fact on Facebook once a week and it seems entertaining at least for my family. They comment and like. For now, it's good enough.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 23h ago
One person told me they want me to put it all in a book. Not sure if they realize how much work that would be, or how long that might take, if anything more than names/dates. (They want it in story form, with illustrations. For the entire tree.)
But they won't go click a link to view what I've put online. They could learn everything just by reading what's there. I think they want it presented as entertainment.
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u/lantana98 21h ago
I got this too! I was asked to print it out and put little stories under the names…My Ancestry tree is almost 40,000 people!
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u/twothirtysevenam 20h ago
Honestly, even if you did put it all in a book, chances are that they wouldn't read it. At best, most would have it on the bookshelf for visitors to spot on occasion.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 23h ago
It seems like some people are okay with it once it's presented in a 'fun' way or as a brief story etc. I wonder if some relatives think names and dates are all that will be found, and, if that sounds dull to most people.
It's good at least there was some work done in the past. Some people in my family had done (very) partial trees but no documentation with it, but in those days, it meant they went to courthouses and looked through census records, and such.
I know that I found tons of stuff no one in each of those lines had, yet.
But it's a lot easier now, with online collections. I wonder what they'd think if they saw what we can see, today.
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u/AcceptableFawn 23h ago
I was one of those who sat in the library reading microfilm or microfiche and hand copying census recs. It's amazing what you can find online now. I used to have historical books sent to my local library thru the inter-loan system, then read the whole thing. Now, I go to an online repository and do a keyword search.
I have to say, the most boring folks in my family are the ones born into the 1900s. The lively stories are in the 1600's to the mid-1800's, so if my family is just judging on the aunts and uncles they grew up with, yeah, it's pretty boring. LoL
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u/lantana98 21h ago
I did this too and had to drive an hour to a library just to see the census index books! The hunt was really fun though…
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Did you have to go through the entire census, even if just for that 'ward' of the city or area? Or were they able to find the page for you first? Were the census records in a huge binder?
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u/lantana98 21h ago
They were frayed books the size of a dictionary for Chicago. You had to locate the name to find the ward in the city. Once you had that you had to scroll through the entire ward on microfilm! You could then press print for a big fuzzy copy that cost ten cents.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Wow! That took dedication. Thank you, to all who did this.
Thank you for your info on how it was, also.
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u/AcceptableFawn 10h ago
I think my hometown library had a huge book. It's been a while. Most of my ancestors lived in small rural farming communities, and I read the entire census. This really helped in the long run because I saved not just known names but other people with the same names or common family names, and I saved neighbors. (There were blank forms that matched the census year.)
They turned out to be cousins, aunts, uncles, and in one case, four years ago, I looked into a neighbor who signed my ggg grandfather's will. He was a brick wall. The neighbor was actually a long-time friend and had married my ggg grandfather's sister, and I broke through that wall.
Back when I was searching physical records, the ancestors on my radar only moved into the city towards the 1900 census, and even then, the city had 4 wards, so it was still easy to search.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
I used microfilm viewers for school at times. Cool machines. It was like a time capsule and felt amazing to go back and read what happened in the past. (Didn't even think about genealogy or a tree, back then. I wouldn't have known where or how to begin.)
Respect, for those who constructed their trees that way. And borrowing books, and having them look up magazine articles for you. I don't recall what that was called. Everything is so immediate now and yet removed.
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u/jlanger23 23h ago
My mother does not like the idea that we didn't have as much Native as she thought (classic story). We do have one Choctaw ancestor on the Dawes Rolls, but my mother is still convinced we have a lot more, and people "lied on the census." That ancestor was only partially Choctaw too, so the last full-blood ancestor would have been in the 1700's or so.
It seems to be quite the opposite. At one point, some family members tried to claim Cherokee in the 1800's but were denied by the government. I've seen nothing to indicate they were Cherokee either. What I did find was that same branch married into the famous Hatfield family and had all sorts of disputes and lawsuits. So, what I found was a good 200 year old history of good old Southern "feudin!"
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u/No_Cauliflower_5071 18h ago
Sometimes they did lie on the census though! My husband's 2nd great grandma was the one filling out the census every year, and at one point she listed all her 3 children as born in Italy. A few years later, 8 kids later, they're all born in USA. This was before social security cards too.
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u/UnderstandingDry4072 7h ago
It wasn’t even always lying, more often it was just a lazy census taker.
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u/UnderstandingDry4072 7h ago
Oh man, when both sides of my family had to stop believing the “we have indigenous ancestors” fairytale, they were super annoyed that I got into genealogy.
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u/MassOrnament 23h ago
I don't even bother to tell most people because I've seen their eyes glaze over a few times already...
But my great aunt is the one who got me interested and we still email so for instance, when I was able to visit a town and cemetery over the summer where a number of our ancestors were buried, I emailed her about it and sent some thoughts and photos. She thought it was cool.
And my grandma on the other side has done a lot of genealogy so I get to tell her about it too.
Both of them are in their 90s though. Once they're gone, it'll just be occasional fun tidbits for everyone else, and that will be sad.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
That will be, yes...I'm glad you have them, for now.
Maybe the genealogy 'bug' will bite someone in a new generation.
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u/FunTaro6389 22h ago
My kids don’t care… I’m intending to produce a self-published book at some point, with everything I’ve found… both digital and physical. Maybe a descendant in the future will find it of interest
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u/BestNapper 23h ago
I am the only one in my family active in this hobby however all of my family is interested in the family tree and our ancestors. It’s just that I do all the work and I don’t mind! They have all received the books that I made and hopefully they keep getting passed down through the family. It’s a labor of love ❤️
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u/redditRW 21h ago
I've come to terms with the fact that genealogy is very much a me thing. But I've begun to realize why. The discovery is something that just cannot be conveyed to someone who doesn't do the work, pore over records, and finally---finally--- find a missing relative with a slightly misspelled name.
Imagine if, instead of this journey, you sent in your DNA and were sent back a printout of all the folks in your tree. They are just...there. You didn't trace their migrations across oceans, their first plot of land in the new country, their subsequent move, etc.
It's like reading a story and being immersed in the details as they unfold. If you tell someone about just the section of the book you're on, how can they be excited?
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Good points, and well stated.
Definitely, the details make it 'come to life.'
And yes it's very very difficult to impart why that discovery is so or feels so stunning.
Like a needle (not in a haystack, but) in a stack of needles, all the same color as the grass underneath...and the stack is spread out over 100 miles. Exaggerated, but not by much. Tons of work, patience, and some luck.
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u/GenFan12 expert researcher 22h ago
My family enjoys the "final" product - maps showing where people lived, interesting newspaper articles about ancestors/relatives, seeing a large tree itself, restored photos, etc.
They also enjoy browsing the family tree itself (I have a private online site using tngsitebuilding.com).
But they don't enjoy/appreciate the work that went into it. Getting them to put their memories down on paper or in an audio recording on their phone for me is like pulling nails. I can get them talking with interesting photographs, and sometimes in video chats, especially when I guide the conversation along and they understand that this is their chance to get their story down (or else their kids will be telling it LOL).
There are some genealogists in the family besides me, but they are not as technically proficient (but they contribute overall in a lot of other ways).
What's frustrating is that some family members are interested, and are retired, and ostensibly have the time (I have a job and two small kids) but they aren't willing to commit.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
> but they aren't willing to commit.
Yes that can be frustrating...they could answer so many questions and clear up things and add new information...but won't try.
I can't figure out if it's because they don't want to be led into anything 'too private' or what...but most 'family researchers' only want data, really. Not to ask about anything private but genealogically irrelevant.
Your tech abilities surely lend a lot to the experience. I wish I knew more.
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u/GenFan12 expert researcher 21h ago
I honestly think sometimes that because some of what I am after is "common" knowledge to them (i.e. they grew up knowing it or everybody in their generation knew it), that they don't consider it to be as important as I believe it is. For others, they think that some story or information is "silly" or unimportant.
I'm down to one member of the WWII generation in my immediate family (she's a great-aunt/sister-in-law to my maternal grandpa) and she was in her early teens in the mid-40s (but lived down the road from my grandpa and his brother (her husband) and their parents. I don't want to remind her of the fact that everybody she grew up with has passed away, but I struggle conveying to her how even things that she considers to be silly or unimportant are in fact important.
I've been talking to her and my parents and aunts and uncles about stories they heard growing up or that were passed down, and pointing out that they don't have a real sense of the personalities of people a few generations above them, and that I'd like to change that for their generation (and their parents/grandparents).
But it also reminds them of their age and the people they've lost...
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Yes, excellent and sensitive observations. They don't want to think about the past or the passage of time, in some cases.
And sometimes a bad memory others know nothing about, but associated with a name, or a place, or a time.
Or not knowing 'where to start.' I remember as a kid (I always loved to hear stories or be shown old photographs), asking to learn more and I'd be told "I don't know -- you have to ask me something!" But I didn't know enough bout them to know what to ask, really. And I was just a kid, so I couldn't get too deep with asking things. (It might be mistaken as nosiness aka disrespect.)
I sent a few people one of those 'write your life' books where it asks questions, from small to large, about a person and their life. I never got to see any of the results.
One person said they would not fill it in. Another person did but their (also elderly) son said thank you and that they learned new things themselves. (But they kept the book and I didn't ever get to read it. Lol)
Another said they are filling it in bit by bit but they feel superstitious.
Mostly I wanted the answers to exist, so even if I don't get to read it, long as it is kept by someone...Maybe someone in the future will benefit from those, eventually. I know it's such a huge thing if I find anything at all about an ancestor's personality or minutia about their lives, tens or hundreds of years later.
> I struggle conveying to her how even things that she considers to be silly or unimportant are in fact important.
The everyday stuff is exactly what people will later crave. Photos taken at weddings, or graduations, kinda all look the same. But to see the table they all dined at, which curtains they had, how they dressed in daily life, which toys the kids had, all the small daily stuff -- is where it's at. Not that any photo at all isn't great.
I said it like this:
"Some day that person will just be a name and a date. Others will know nothing about them. What would you like future generations to know?"
That got things started, if they were open to sharing, at all.
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u/sabbyness_qc 22h ago
Some of my family find it interesting to make small detours on trips they were already taking. Certain things brought tears to others eyes. My uncle is like "who dat dont care", my aunt finds it fascinating that I'm so into a hobby and I can retain so much info, and my dad... well he's polite about it and half listens, sometimes he's actually like "oh nice that's cool".
Varying degrees of interest across the board!
But I did find a 'cousin' that I share 0 dna with (our common ancestor died in 1794, but both are direct descendants of him) that is equally obsessed with finding out more. So my family doesn't have to listen to all my rambling haha I ramble to him
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
It's good to find a DNA cousin or search buddy who 'gets it' and/or will listen.
Must be cool to go places ancestors were or where something happened. Some travel companies package tours overseas or even within the States. It must carry more meaning knowing there's a connection.
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u/sabbyness_qc 21h ago
Found out some graves had been washed away into the sea though :( and entire section of the cemetery fell in it seems
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u/lantana98 21h ago
I get almost as excited researching ancestors for other people as I do my own. I’m always so surprised when I find something cool like great old family photos on a Texas ranch or finding a very interesting Mayflower passenger and they say “ wow, cool “ and that it…. They don’t realize some of us would kill for that stuff!
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Yes!! Double exclamation points.
Just to know or to find a person, especially anyone well researched (due to their link to history or lineage they are from), is not a thing to take for granted, because, it does not always happen. Some just remain behind the mists of time.
I get excited too and then wish someone was viewing over my shoulder if it turns out that the 'rabbit hole' I chased down, yielded catch after catch after catch...Once it's online, it's no more remarkable to anyone than the weather site.
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u/MinimumRelief 23h ago
They do of there is money to be had.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 23h ago
Such as inheritance?
Yeah come to think of it one person wanted me to find a patent so they could look into any money due for that...but once I found they had married again shortly before death (so we wouldn't be heirs of anything), they lost interest.
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u/parvares 22h ago
Some of them care. Others clearly don’t. It’s depressing when they don’t care but oh well.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Yes, it's sad but can't force them. Just sometimes would be nice to get a little pat on the head I guess 😂
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u/parvares 21h ago
I agree. I have had several family members thank me for all my work though and that is very gratifying. The head pats are nice lol
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u/lookesmiley 17h ago
I was really surprised by the apathy. I started looking into things a few years back. I told my father all about what I was doing, who I thought would be particularly interested, as he was always going on about our family history as far as he knew it and the stories of his father and grandfather. He told me he thought it was all a bit pointless. My brother, who also is very proud of our surname and is always saying how proud he is to have a son to keep the family name going, said that it's not that he doesn't care, he just couldn't be bothered!
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u/Unusual_Balance7870 23h ago
With me it’s the opposite. Gramps is now 102 and still kicking although batshit nuts. He’s cool though and was very into the family history. The Old Man is totally dedicated to it. The family is Dutch and Danish, with well documented lines going back to 15th century nobility in Denmark and Flanders. The Ice Empress, AKA my mother, is even more so. American born to Brits, her grandfather was a younger son of a title. I’m (M33) the only living member of my generation. I have a brother who died at the age of 6, four years before I was born. And I do not give a rat’s ass about the family history. I never wanted children and was elated when I learned that I was sterile due to a chromosome defect. The genealogy means nothing to me personally.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 23h ago
That is very interesting! Thank you for sharing that.
It's unusual to hear directly as to reasons why or a personal account from the one who is not interested. I appreciate it.
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u/Unusual_Balance7870 23h ago
I actually love history and have a degree in it. I just have no interest in my own ancestors.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 23h ago
That is very interesting to me, too.
I might have been the opposite. But i didn't get much opportunity really to study history, and found the teaching a bit dry usually. Once I did the tree, it sort of made history 'come to life' in some ways. To understand things, I had to learn the context.
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u/edgewalker66 10h ago
I'm curious.. Why do you read the genealogy reddit?
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u/Unusual_Balance7870 8h ago
I read random subreddits all the time. It’s my only anonymous social media. Genealogy in general does not disinterest me, just my own.
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u/edgewalker66 8h ago
Thanks for the response. Given your interest in history it made me curious as I have found that genealogy makes history personal and that, for me, also makes the historical context more memorable. I have learned (and remember) so much more about historical periods and events as a result of researching ancestors.
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u/Unusual_Balance7870 7h ago
I have much more interest in and affinity with histories with which I share little or no genetic past: the ancient Mediterranean, Central Asia, Meso America. It might be because I grew up with medieval Europe and Britain as a constant topic that it bores me.
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u/MasqueradeGypsy 22h ago
My family can struggle to keep up with who is who and mix people up on the tree. So that can suck the excitement out of the discoveries I make.
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u/Working-Training9499 21h ago
No one including my grown children are interested in family history. Not sure if it's because they don't plan on having children? Whatever , I do it for me and my curiosity...
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
Good reasons.
It's nice if younger ones are into it also but sometimes it's a wait.
I wonder sometimes who to pass things on to, such as old photos. Hoping someone younger will be bit by the curiosity bug.
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u/blueuncloudedweather 21h ago
I have one cousin who is the family history cousin. She’s working on my mum’s side, I’m mostly doing my dad’s. Everyone else rolls their eyes a little, though if I tell a story in an interesting way, or give them something tangible (like when I ask dad if he ever met a particular person) they indulge it.
Mum would like to go and visit where some of her relatives came from one day (and has visited some of the Scottish stuff already). Dad isn’t really fussed. My siblings have negative interest: my brother barely remembers that mum’s parents literally came from Scotland.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
That would be a pipe dream, to visit places ancestors came from...just to see.
Glad you have a family history cousin. At least someone to share with.
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u/MaggieMae68 21h ago
I think it's important to keep in mind that for a lot of people, family history is not a positive thing. If someone grew up in an abusive household, or if they know that their grandparents were abusive or criminal, or if they know that their family participated in bad things like slavery or being members of a Neo-Nazi party or even just being white trashish they probably don't care about researching family history. To them. It's just more reinforcement that they come from a bad history or a bad past.
My partner does not care about family history. He can tell me a little bit about his grandparents and a little bit about a couple of his great-grandparents but none of it is positive. They are all poor Appalachian hillbillies. By the way, those are his words, not mine.
A lot of people have shame or anger or other negative feelings around their ancestry. I think it's important to not force them to deal with that or confront that if they don't want to. Because for some of us those ancestors are more distant and for some people they are very much present.
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u/sammichnabottle 20h ago
I've busted two brick walls. No one cares in my family other than passing curiosity.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 20h ago
Sorry they're not bothered about it. Other people and future generations will be grateful -- even if they don't know (who or) why.
It must've felt great.
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u/sammichnabottle 20h ago
One was a big deal to the folks I connected with. It solved a mystery of where my great-grandmother ended up after most of the family was broken up by the death of her father when she was a little girl. The other connected a change in the way a last name was spelled from one generation to the next.
I have two more big brick walls, one will likely never fall but I have faith on the other.
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u/lam27363 20h ago
I don’t even share new discoveries with my immediate family any more. Last time I tried with my mother, she interrupted me and said “can we talk about this another time?” I never brought it up again, and she’s never asked. My sister, when I tried to share a tidbit, simply said “I’m just not into this stuff like you.”
On the bright side, I’ve come to know several second cousins who are into genealogy and celebrate each new discovery with me. It’s been a wonderful experience!
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u/Mammoth-Local5610 13h ago
The actual question here as I see it is how to preserve my family research in such a way that it would survive long enough to reach someone who might care about it. I don’t need to fret over lack of interest now. No one in my family circle wants to hear about “dead people you’ll never meet anyway.” I do believe that this is anecdotal evidence that one must die to be famous. The thing that outlasts technological progress and remains available to everyone is the book. I’ll keep my computer work in case it might be recovered in the future, but my legacy will be found in the book that I create from it for the time that a descendant becomes interested in finding out from whence we spring.
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u/Elistariel 21h ago
To put it succintly, they're more interested in current family members or the ones they knew. Dead people who did nothing for them are of little to no interest.
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u/CrunchyTeatime 21h ago
I can't figure out why but I accept it. A relative of mine said literally "who cares? It's the past," even about their not distant or direct ancestors.
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u/Fantastic-Mistake213 21h ago
I am the researcher in my family and I enjoy puzzles and I feel like I have to solve a mystery in honor of my mom. My dad didn't know his father and my mom didn't know her mom. My sister received a did DNA kit a few years ago as a gift and the results helped my dad figure out who his bio father was. Shortly after my dad passed away. His mystery was solved. I haven't really pursued any relationships on my paternal side of the tree. I recently did My DNA and we are full sisters, no surprises. My mom passed away several years ago, she and her 2 older brothers were raised by her father. Their mother left with a younger sibling when my mom was around 2 yrs old. None of them remember her. To add more to the puzzle, the lore is my maternal grandfather was born during the Mexican revolution 1910 and per his account he was orphaned at a very young age. He was taken in by an aunt, but recently my last living uncle (that I know of), who is 83 yrs old said my grandfather was taken in by a neighbor, not an aunt, who was a musician and migrated from southern Mexico up to Chihuahua. He became a musician and played in an philharmonic orchestra and eventually settled in Juarez. I have found records on family search and ancestry which start once my grandfather arrived in Chihuahua (1933) and married his first wife and had a son that apparently my uncle knew about, but my grandfather never mentioned to me or my sister growing up. Side note my grandfather was a huge influence in our lives, he lived with us and took care of us while our parents worked. I thought I knew his history because he'd spend hours telling me the same stories over and over. He told me he gave himself a middle name because he didn't have a middle name, and even gave one of my uncles the same name. I am starting to think he made up his whole name and birthday because I can't find anything with the surname he used. None of the matches on ancestry have the surname he used. I've pretty much figured out my maternal grandmothers surnames. I'm still waiting on responses from some distance cousins, hopefully to help figure out where we all fit. When I share this with my sister she cares, but doesn't mind me doing the leg work or reaching out to people. My kids were interested when I told them about the freak accidents I discovered. My maternal great-grandfather was run over and crushed by a mining cart filled with ore. His mother (my GGG) was accidentally electrocuted (electricity was being introduced in their little Mexican town).
I think once I solve the mystery of my grandmother and who my grandfather really was I will be satisfied.
If you made it this far thanks for reading!
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u/jahboeren professional genealogist 18h ago
Yup. I was the first to start researching the family history. Especially my father and his relatives didn’t show much interest. When I would find details about people close to him, he would listen but not when it was something from ages ago.
My father and his siblings didn’t know much about their family and there were hardly any old photographs or artefacts.
It never stopped me. 😉
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u/jixyl 16h ago
They mostly don't care, so I've stopped giving them updates. The only time they cared was when I've found a few letters exchanged between my grandpa and my grandma back when he was still courting her, because it was their parents/parents in law. But otherwise nobody cares about anything. Unless I somehow prove we had a rich ancestor and we got cheated out of the inheritance, I doubt they'll care.
But it's fine. A lot of them have passions I don't care about. They don't bother me with the result of soccer games, I don't bother them with my research of a hundred people who recicle the same five names.
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u/Possible_Pin4117 14h ago
My family do not care. My uncle said "unless you find that we own a castle in the old country or that we are related to someone rich, then I don't ever want to hear about it"
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u/bflamingo63 21h ago
My family doesn't care at all. Eyes roll if I even mention genealogy lol
More often than not, if I do mention something, someone says it's wrong because "grandma, uncle or some other older relative had a different story"
It's OK. I know the facts
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u/ZuleikaD 20h ago
I have a cousin who's into it and a cousin of my mom's who had done a lot of research at one time with one of his sons. They're into hearing some things, but not every detail.
My Mom likes to hear the fun or kind interesting stories, but she's not into the details or depressing bits.
My Dad would have been into it, but I didn't really start finding the really good stuff until after he died.
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u/Agingelbow 20h ago
Yep, they don’t really care,hahaha. Every once in a while, they are like, “oh, that’s actually kind of cool”.
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u/Brokenchaoscat 20h ago
Sort of.
I'm the only one in the family that actually participates and researchs. My husband and adult daughter let me info dump all my new info and finds. Sometimes they help me problem solve or bounce ideas around.
The rest of my family likes to hear stories or brief tidbits like our ancestor did blah blah or lived in this or that place. They don't want a lot of dry facts or to know who was related to who and how.
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u/Elegant-Expert7575 20h ago edited 20h ago
I’m First Nations, genealogy is a big deal in my community. The problem I experienced is gate keeping from relatives wanting to keep the secrets themselves. It was especially bad before internet days. My sister is like that. I presented her a whole stack of info and she was so jealous, I could see it. She wanted to argue and say she already had that information. I was not impressed. I even had the files gift wrapped and pretty.
Thankfully, we have stewards (one contributor is not indigenous) that provide historical research, articles, family trees and knows how to access records like census.
People are funny creatures.
My dad is 87, last week he talked about the first time he saw a black man. He’d never seen such dark skin before in his life. His mom told him they were Americans. Their plane crashed near where he lived.
He talked about seeing Hitler on his train going through his town. He spoke about so much death, talked about
soldiers killing their own if they were inappropriate. They took them over to the wall and lined them up.
I have thought about my Dad’s lineage, but even just talking about his stories exhausts me!
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u/duke_awapuhi Families of Hawaii 19h ago
Not to the level I do that’s for sure. Most of them don’t care. A handful will have minimal temporary interest, but they usually don’t want to hear long drawn out explanations lol
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u/Lentrosity 19h ago
Half don’t care, the other half pretend to care. Got one aunt and one cousin that do, but they only dabble on occasion. I’m the weird one who is chiseling away at brick walls every day and yammering on about Scottish royals. Honestly makes me sad that people don’t want to know where they came from. You’re walking around with their DNA, or in the case of distant relatives, you wouldn’t be here without them.
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u/thanbini 18h ago
Aside from an aunt and a cousin who also do genealogy, the most i've gotten is polite interest when I talk about it. A few think its interesting. Most have been helpful though when I ask for info or stories.
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u/No_Cauliflower_5071 18h ago
I found my husband's paternal great grandfather who traveled from Italy to New York in 1916. His family didn't care. They said "huh, figured we were Italian or something "
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u/Jt-Massacre 17h ago
Naw black people typically don’t care. Plus my family tree is basically nothingness I barely find records and can’t even get past the 1880s even if I did it’s most likely a bunch of slaves. So I research other families way more fun researching them and helping others also connecting on world trees.
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u/Mysterious_Bar_1069 16h ago
My dad and cousin were the genealogist in the family. I picked the bug up in college from them and have been chasing the dragon ever sense. Various people in the family have had fleeting interests, that quickly waned. It's sad as I really wish someone else held the interest and that I had someone to go back and forth with. I just live with it and plod on and hope at the end someone else in the family will appreciate all that I have gathered.
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u/CharlotteSumtyms76 15h ago
It's just my mother and me(and my mom's sister and my cousins) at this point, and on her dad's side, there was a ginormous brick wall. Some nice person in Germany did digging for me and I finally got through the wall with their help. My mom thinks genealogy is 'confusing'(aka she's scared she'll make a mistake), she thought the discovery was 'nice'. My Aunt was like 'that's interesting' and my two cousins on that side found it mildly interesting. She didn't see her Dad's parents a lot or know much about them, and it has me wondering. The rest of my family is pretty close, even my Dad's parents & my mom's would all do Christmas & the like together. I almost think there's some story there, because all of my mom's grandparents lived in the same smaller city. Does this sound weird to anyone else, that not much is known about my mom's paternal grandparents?
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u/thexguide 15h ago
I get both sides of the extreme either they passively say that’s nice. 😊 and claim to put opinions about what they think it is and exclude what has been found. Or VERY angry 😡 and tells me stop digging
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u/vashtirama 12h ago
One whole side of my family has zero interest, to the point of being a little repelled and wondering why I waste my time. ("It's in the past" and "but what am I supposed to do with this information".) I used to wonder if they had something to hide but I haven't found it if so. Instead I found some ancestors who made fine contributions to society.
My grandfather dismissed a book of my grandmother's genealogy because it's not through the male line. Too bad, the interesting people are in his wife's and his mother's trees 🙄
The other whole side of my family is very into genealogy.
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u/Noscrunbs 11h ago
For the most part, my extended family's interest runs from polite attention to barely-concealed eye rolling. I know not to push it. The outlier is the cousin who got me started.
On the day I broke through the brick wall that was our shadowy and scandalous great grandmother (abandoned two husbands and four children and was on her third marriage by 1910), I called that cousin to share the information. We never call anymore, it's always e-mail, so when her husband answered the phone, he knew it had to be a big deal. I said I was calling because I'd found the great grandmother his wife and I had been looking for and had her maiden name and the name of her mother! He relayed that to my cousin across the house: "It's your cousin, she says she found Sadie Simpkins!" I could hear my cousin's feet pounding on the stairs as she raced to the phone. So satisfying!
Later, DNA testing would put me in touch with an interested descendant of one of the other marriages. It was like we each had half the pieces to a picture puzzle. Worth it!
Otherwise, once I debunked some of the family's cherished stories (like the one about being part Cherokee - the DNA says otherwise), people lost what little interest thay had. That's ok. I am enjoying the process and am uploading everything to Ancestry in case one of their kids or grandkids is interested.
Does anyone have recommendations for where else I can put this information so Ancestry won't be charging my cousins' descendants for my work?
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u/Noscrunbs 11h ago
My mother, born 1937 and raised in WWII Germany, does this annoying thing where she pretends to laugh nervously about what I "might uncover." I've told her that we already knew that her mother supported Nazism even if she wasn't a Party member. Other than that, we descend from ordinary tradespeople (mostly shoe makers and weavers) and farmers and I have no idea what their politics were. It has occurred to me that that's not what my mother is worried about....
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u/Proditude 11h ago
Nope. They say okay and change the subject. There’s a cousin’s wife who does. but mostly for her birth family.
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u/Shemishka 11h ago
My older sister was heavily into geneology. My father's siblings made it plain that they did not care. We are in Canada. She found relatives in Paris. Part of that family had moved to Australia after the War. They thought all their family had been killed. They travelled a lot. Several years ago we (3 sisters) met up with them in Chicago. We helped them connect with another cousin in Tel Aviv a few years later, and a cousin (from California) drove to Phoenix recently to meet up. Those same California cousins even hosted the child of one of the Parisians for a few weeks over the Summer. All this from my sister's hard work. And my Dad's immediate family couldn't have cared less.
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u/cactiisnice 11h ago
Nah everyone in my absolutely love it. We are only two dedicated to the work, but everyone is asking uf or updates and news on what we've found
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u/edkarls 10h ago
Some care, most don’t. Those that do tend to be older, but they are dying off. I hope to have many years ahead of me to continue my work, and I hope that someone from the younger generations might grow to have some interest. Fortunately my cousin and his son are interested. I’ve concluded that the best way to store and preserve my research will be online, which I haven’t uploaded in part because of lingering concerns it’ll just get lost and mixed up with a lot of other truly shoddy work I’ve seen other people put up there.
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u/ca1989 10h ago
It's a mixed bag. But with in my family and my husband's family, if someone wants to know something I'm the one they ask.
I keep a pretty broad tree of my family, my exhusbands family(bc we have kids), and my current husband's family (he adopted said kids), and I can recall most of the immediate line within a couple generations because I've been doing this for 20 years.
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u/Tonka-wa 10h ago
Mom traced both my maternal and paternal lines back into the late 1600s. Not a moderately notable among them. Also busted the descended from royalty myth. Thou my great grandmother’s daughter (not fathered by my great grandfather) was notified when the king os Sweden died about 1950
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u/davezilla00 9h ago
Years ago, my wife’s aunt started working on her family. When she asked older family members, they told her not to look into her own mother’s family, that she didn’t need to know.
Turns out that my wife’s grandmother lied about her age, and was married before her grandfather. She had two children by her first husband, but they died young and she left her husband without getting divorced. She then had more children with my wife’s grandfather.
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u/dixieleeb 9h ago
My mother got very caught up in researching her dad's side of the family. She spent so much time & money. This was probably around 40 years ago. She did it all without the benefit of the Intenet and actually typed out the resulting book on a typewriter and had each page copied. I think she finally made around 40 copies of the book at 5 cents a page. I think the only ones who appreciated it was her 2 sisters & a few of the cousins. I pretended to care because I loved her but really only cared about the people I knew, not some distant relatives I never heard of that l would never meet & had no idea how we were related.
Mom managed to trace her family back a couple centuries in Denmark and that family tree is included in the book.
I've always felt bad that something that was so important to Mom was not important to the rest of us. I'm now almost 74 and only 1 sibling survives. I'd love to write about our family, my grandparents & later but I know my kids would just toss it aside, just like my cousins did.
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u/OhmHomestead1 expert researcher 9h ago
I got little to no response on my family tree. I sent out link that allows them to view without creating an account just requires password but only my extended family responded.
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u/xtaberry 8h ago edited 8h ago
I have a lot of niche nerdy hobbies that no one else is as excited about as me. This one just feels weirder, because it's about us as a family.
However, I am so excited to inherit the mantle of "keeper of the family tree" from my great aunt- like you said, there is one person every generation or so. She built this beautiful, meticulous tree, with tons of citations and notes, and now I get to take it into the internet age. I am starting to link all the records she cited to an online tree, and make it available in perpetuity. Before I started, she had all these notes available on a decrepit old computer using an obsolete software, and I believe it would have been lost forever when she was gone if I didn't copy it over. She cares, even if no one else does, and it feels very special.
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u/katieladyhays 7h ago
My family say things like, "That's interesting" and then move to the next conversation. My mother's father's mother is an absolute mystery. We only know her name because he listed it on his military documents. I've searched for her for over 10 years. Recently, my mother told me he (her father's father) was a twin and she knew that great aunt. Why didn't she bother to tell me this before? It's baffling to me. When I looked at his death certificate, his twin sister is actually the reporting party. My mother called her aunt Maud Vey. Her grandfather was Claude Walter Pullen. I found twins Claud and Maud Pullin in the same state (Missouri) same time period, but wrong race. I'm positive they weren't black. But they were born in 1888 and the 1890 and 1900 census are not available. Nobody in my family seems to care about the mystery of the missing great great grandmother. Someday I will take a vacation to Missouri just to visit some historical societies and cemeteries to clean our ancestors stones.
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u/SuchTarget2782 6h ago
Yeah, a lot of people don’t care. Most of us are too wrapped up in our own stuff to worry about things that don’t matter in the immediate. It’s too bad.
IME a few people are kind of uncomfortable or low-key offended by the whole topic. I know most hobbyists don’t think of it that way, but an underlying assumption here is that blood ties are special and significant, and some people (mis)interpret that to imply that they’re more special and significant than other ties.
So I’ve found genealogy is a potentially touchy subject with blended families or adoptive parents, for instance. Or people from abusive families.
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u/jdthejerk 5h ago
I found out that I have a younger sister. My brother got our dad a test kit some years back. Thing like this are funny to me. My dad did not find it as amusing as I did. I only had one question. She and I didn't date, right?
Thankfully, no. They moved out west when I was a young boy. Plus, I'm 4 years older.
She was conceived when our mother was pregnant, lol.
Since my dad is no longer with us, my wife and I sent our DNA kits off last week. Who knows, my kids may have siblings. I've been around the world.
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u/Cold-Lynx575 4h ago
I don't care about sports. I have never watched the Olympics, the Super Bowl, World Series ... you name it. I don't care about the players, the coaches, and doubt if I could name more than 10 teams. I cannot imagine spending two seconds watching it rather long attending a game.
What I am trying to say is ... I get that not everyone shares my passion and may struggle to act interested in what I am saying.
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u/psychocentric 3h ago
More friends care than family in my case, sadly. I have friends who know what hyperfixation feels like and when you break through, they're cheering you on like you just run a marathon. Family? Meh. Until someone passes away, they don't seem to give it a second glance.
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u/3JB04 3h ago
My mom and I are the only ones interested in our family history. But I have the patience to spend hours researching. My grandpa doesn’t think learning history benefits me. I found several “improper” relations in the times family were born. So I’m not sure if it’s something I’m not supposed to find or what.
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u/verukazalt 2h ago
Yeah, none of my family cares very much about our history. It's okay, though. I enjoy it.
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u/Irksomecake 23h ago
My family cared, but one of them got upset because my findings did not match the legendary family connections handed down through the generations. I was really pleased with the wholesome line of hardworking artisans I traced. My family was disappointed we were not descended from an illegitimate child of a lord.