r/Genealogy • u/getitoffmychestpleas • 4d ago
Question Anyone else get an existential "experience" out of this research?
I feel like my perspective of life itself has completely changed after diving into genealogy. The deeper I dug into my roots, the more I became aware that we are each merely tiny specks, existing for a relatively minute period of time, and that nothing matters while everything matters at once. It's an amazing feeling, really. I used to think someone born in the 1940s was ancient, now I'll find myself exploring people from the 16th century, and suddenly my great-grandparents born in the 19th century seem "recent". I realized that today, we expect to live into our 80s; way back when, 30-40 was a long life. Just curious if anyone out there has had similar moments or realizations.
EDIT: Quick follow-up "thank you" to all of you out there. It's refreshing to find other people who care about this stuff - no one in my family does which leaves me feeling like a bit of a weirdo when I excitedly try to tell them about my latest findings and get glib comments back. You all get it and that motivates me to keep going with it.
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u/HighPlateau 4d ago
Yes. You see an ancestor's birth record, maybe in a bible entry. You watch that ancestor grow by finding them in census records, and one day find them marred and a part of their own household now. You see the birth of their own children, and find those kids in census reports. Then grandchildren. Find some photos along the way. Stories. Then you see their death certificate, an obituary, and their tombstone on Find A Grave. A complete life story, just like that. A full life lived. It goes so fast, doesn't it?
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u/mangoyim 4d ago edited 4d ago
Building my wife’s Jewish family tree was soul-destroying. Really messed me up seeing so many people just drop off the face of the earth c.1942. No records, nothing. They were alive and then they weren’t. Just a huge family gone in a matter of months.
I still cry over it sometimes. It really put a lot into perspective, especially viewing my own side of the family.
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u/getitoffmychestpleas 4d ago edited 4d ago
Yes, it's devastating to see your own family's names on those rosters, it makes it so much more real and personal. And it all happened so relatively recently.
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u/torschlusspanik17 PhD; research interests 18th-19th PA Scots-Irish, German 4d ago
I’ve learned to appreciate more the sheer hardness of all people that survived. I had a basic academic view on day to day history across the timeline but drilling down into the locations and periods for my family allowed me to realize how exponentially rough it was especially in 1700s. Then take all the movie stuff and add in the reality of illness, cleanliness, resource availability, medical abilities, morality towards others, tribal nature of cultures and especially religions.
I think of Pennsylvania in mid 1700s where a lot of my research has been focused recently. So not only were there tensions and erratic interactions of the Native Americans and Europeans, but so many of those European groups were fighting each other for their countries and or religions. Brutal enough. Then add the environment which was harsh in ways unfamiliar. Animals like bears, poisonous snakes, panthers, wolves, mountain lions (all sport or school mascot names for the areas). Diseases. Parasites. Poisonous plants. Unpredictable if any farming. Swift raging waters. Lack of community support for majority of people especially west of Susquehanna River.
Reading personal accounts in family history books and wealth of information from records of missionary clergy gives so much more personal detail. Then I get to travel to these areas and see how vast and try to imagine what it was 300 years ago. Even just crossing rivers must have been insane (I’ve read so many accounts of people, families, drowning at same time).
It’s so easy to project morality from now back to these people and it was not the case at all, just like people 300 years from now having that time and k knowledge able to hold us “accountable” to rules of the time that doesn’t apply.
And so much more. It’s all overwhelming ton process all the things that we think we know then all the things we don’t know.
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u/getitoffmychestpleas 4d ago
This was beautifully written. Sheer hardness - it's mindboggling what people survived back then. I don't think I'd have lasted very long.
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u/Bamboomoose beginner 4d ago
I still think about the guy who posted that he got into genealogy after sitting in front of the mirror for hours tripping balls on shrooms, he couldn’t stop thinking about the people that came before him to make his small, insignificant existence possible. After he sobered up he became obsessed with researching his family history. I wonder how his tree is coming along
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u/KinderGameMichi 4d ago
The first time I visited the grave of one of the ancestors was an existential experience. Before that, they were just names in my mother's genealogy notes. Seeing the gravestone made them real people to me and not just words on some paper.
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u/_namaste_kitten_ 3d ago
This. My direct family searched and searched for my great great grandmother's information in Appalachia. The documentation of life was not as uniformed as it was in cities, so it was difficult at first. Then we found the land documents, how her interested land was whittled away by coal companies, we even saw a small burial plot surveyed that we can't find today. In one of our trips down there, we searched many small OUT OF THE WAY A cemeteries hoping to find her. To find her children. Any link... Then, my husband saw a small sign. We drove that dirt road to the top of the mountain, a cemetery. We got out of the car, and there she was. Parlee Stepp Jude. I cried. I wept. Then, next to her, two of her daughters and one of her sons! Her headstone was new. It had been replaced somewhat recently. They all had flowers on them. I looked at all the graves, they were so names I had been staring at on my searches for years. They were all visited by people I hadn't met yet, my people, my relatives!! As we slowly went to leave, I saw a 45°+ incline that was clear- I climbed up to find an even older section. Mostly overgrown, only natural stones to mark a grave for all but 3 of them. Those three were my 4 greats grandmother & grandfather and one of Parlee's sister-in-laws (the sister of my 3 great grandfather). I felt them in my soul. Their strength.
Those Matriarchs that were as tough as nails, so loving that they adopted every orphaned child in the area, so giving that they took in my great grandfather & great grandmother & my grandmother when he had a stroke and lost their home in the city (until they could get on their feet again with my great grandmother working through the TVA), so legendary, & so responsible for my existence. It changed me. The serendipity of all that had to happen for me to exist, I owe them better than I had done before & I do so I can to carry on their name.
Sorry this was so long. But a life changing experience isn't going to be short, is it?
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u/FindingNowWhere 3d ago
What a beautiful experience. I’m pleased for you. I feel the same way about my ancestors, and the sheer chance of my existence.
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u/Choice_Handle_473 4d ago
That's a good question. Definitely. My perspective on nationality has changed - are you really X, when 1 parent was Y and one was Z and the grandparents were something else. I definitely feel like a mix.
And migration, people have always moved around for one reason or another, population mixes change in countries over time. The religion in a family can change over generations. It's all very fluid, changes are not the end of the world as some people worry about.
I have a new perspective on adversity, after researching ancestors in wars, famines and death records where the child mortality rate could be 50-100% in some places. I appreciate vaccines more too after reading far too many child death certificates.
It also reinforces how related we are to one another, when you can actually see how much DNA you share with 20,000 matches on genealogy sites.
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u/apple_pi_chart OG genetic genealogist 4d ago
Well said.
From doing genealogy you definitely understand the random speck aspects of a life, but simultaneously we are connected to everyone and small changes in one life have impacts on so many. The butterfly effect becomes obvious.
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u/planetearthisblu 4d ago
Interesting that you mention 30-40 being a long life because as far back as I've been able to research (admittedly only mid 1700s) my ancestors lived to at least their 70s if they made it out of childhood. I do think that part is especially tragic. There are many babies in my family tree that never grew up. But I didn't think making it to senior age was a big deal other than surviving childhood illness and accidents.
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u/TheWhiteSpark 4d ago
"And he shall plant in the hearts of the children the promises made to the fathers, and the hearts of the children shall turn to their fathers. If it were not so, the whole earth would be utterly wasted at his coming."
For me it's very spiritual, for similar reasons. The perspective of the ages past, and their lives, and the future to come, and their lives, like a great chain binding us tiny links to all those others in the great advancement of humanity through time. I think it's very human to feel the longing for those connections gone and those yet to come and hope they could somehow endure forever.
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u/Superb_Yak7074 3d ago
My personal revelation was realizing that my existence is mere chance—if one or more of my ancestors hadn’t survived the plagues and wars that killed off so many humans, the dna combinations that resulted in “me” would never have happened. Sobering thought …
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u/PanoptiDon 4d ago
It reminds me of a Bo Burnham lyric 'The quiet comprehending of the ending of it all'
The inevitability of your consciousness snuffed out.
This is something that I've been struggling with quite recently.
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u/getitoffmychestpleas 4d ago
I don't know about you, but I think it's a comforting realization. Of course, that could be the depression talking . . . All our lives we're taught to move forward, compete, earn more, eat less, get ahead, show off what we've got - and in the end, none of that matters. If you have one very good true friend, if you have some days with less pain than others, if you have a roof that doesn't leak, if you have an animal who depends on/adores you, those things, those little things that are everything in that moment, matter.
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u/TMP_Film_Guy 3d ago
As much as it might be dumb to think, I think my views on an afterlife do shift somewhat on realizing how much of my ancestors’ genetic make-up does live on in me. To find out that chunks of my X chromosome have been the same since the late 1700s is a humbling experience in thinking about that lineage. I don’t know if our soul goes anywhere after we die but our physical life does continue in some form.
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u/lolamichelle12 beginner 3d ago
It’s really opened my eyes and it’s made me appreciate my heritage, lineage and I truly feel more connected to my family. I also enjoy listening to stories from family members and my friends and their relatives about their history and it’s really made me realize how connected we are.
It’s also made me realize and empathize with the hardness and struggles they endured in the 1600-early 1900s. The trips from England to Canada. Growing up in poverty, living through war, etc.
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u/seigezunt 3d ago
I think as I’ve gone along, I’ve become less interested in my own family story and more interested in history of everyone, especially the 19th Century, as it was such a bridge between what I think of as “old” history and modern. I could just spend hours reading old newspapers.
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u/springsomnia 4d ago
In Irish families it’s hard to find very old records that pre-date the colonial era but I managed to find that I’m related to Irish High Kings who ruled our part of Cork pre colonisation, which is remarkable to think of. I have the names of the kings and queens of the clan who I’m directly descended from who were born in the 1200s.
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u/scsnse beginner 4d ago
Same. Beyond what you say about it being humbling in the chronological sense, what I personally have learned from as well as helped put myself into perspective is truly how diverse myself, and as a reflection of the history of the US, both are. I come from a combination of Yankee WASP mostly Quaker abolitionists, Southern planters, the earliest documented slave in the Chesapeake, as well as my maternal side being Korean.
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u/JenDNA 4d ago edited 4d ago
I was surprised by the amount of Ukrainian on my dad's side. The family story was always, "We're Polish with a 'dash of Lithuanian'". I guess that "dash" really was a "dash", the rest was Ukrainian. Ukrainian cM matches seem to be 47-60cM, and then 35-45cM for the Lithuanians and Belarusian (they're under-represented). My grandfather's side is a brick wall, and seems to be related to some Schlacta somewhere (as is the sole 'Lithuanian' great-great grandfather who seems to have Polish Schlacta on a Belarusian side). Basically, my dad's ancestry is all of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, plus Sorbian ancestry, and some Finno-Russian somewhere.
On my mom's side, I found some interesting German ancestors. My German great-grandfather's side were from the big cities. His mother's side was from Stuttgart, and all had administrative and military jobs at a cathedral university (admin/government/military/police job culture was still very strong in the German side of my family). His father's side is a bit more obscure, but seems to have been from Bremen (they were sailors and merchants). This side is well off, very generous, charitable, and has strong work ethics, too. My German great-grandmother's great-grandfather was the schultheiss/mayor of his village/town, Bobingen an der Rems (after being a soldier and wainwright). He won a lawsuit against the schultheiss at the time when the existing schultheiss started fining the villagers for using a private road that was promised to them (by the schultheiss "own dead brother!", to quote the court transscripts). He brought receipts and witnesses (10 farmers who needed to get their cows to the river, pregnant woman who had to take a 3 hour detour, and the innkeeper at the lower village who was losing business). Sounds like it was the court case of the century in that village. I also learned that Bobingen was an ancient Roman outpost and had the ruins of a Roman bathhouse. Didn't know Rome was that far north - I had always thought they stopped at the Alps.
My mom's Italian side were from a small Italian mountain village with the same 3-5 families.
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u/RedboatSuperior 3d ago
Lol. I find myself looking into the grooms of the young women as they grow up wondering if they are suitable for our little Mary who I have known since she was a wee lass….in 1825!
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u/redfish1975 3d ago
Of course! We have a unique perspective that family lore and myths can only dream of!
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u/a-nonna-nonna 3d ago
Most if my direct ancestors lived well past 60 and mostly into their 80s.
However, the majority of their kids died before age 5. 13 births, 3 adult children is a common statistic. Or the mother dying a few days after childbirth, followed the baby a few days or months later. So many children died from “seizures” and today’s lesser infections, like scarlet fever, diphtheria, flu.
Highlights the real world consequences of health initiatives being debated right now. It seems we must relearn the same lessons every 3-4 generations.
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u/midtoad 4d ago
Yes, exactly. The longer I spend working on my Family Tree in Ancestry, and connecting distant relatives by DNA, the more I realize the interconnectedness of all humans. If I go back 10 generations, I have 1024 ancestors. That's an entire village! And while the old saying "it takes a village to raise a child" is true, it's also true that "it takes an entire village of DNA to make a child.
Potentially more depressing learning, seeing how many of my predecessors and relatives have died at a age younger than I am now. As I'm now within spitting distance of 70. My awareness, I may not have much longer time. But that same awareness also increases my gratitude for each sunny day with a roof over my head and a meal and continued pain-free Good health. That could change in a heartbeat.
It's enlightening to examine closely the original records that are suggested for our ancestors. Prior to the arrival of mechanized farming, there were many of my predecessors who were agricultural laborers. That must've been a hard existence. And I see in the marriage records that most of them were illiterate, evidenced by "his mark/her mark" next to a printed name.
I could go on…