[strawberrypuree]

I find your perspective and interest in your genealogy fascinating, primarily because I don’t share it. Like, not one bit, and I’m not sure why. If I found out tomorrow that my parents weren’t actually my parents and I was actually adopted, I would have no interest in finding my “real” parents. I’m also totally uninterested in having children — it seems like something other people are much better suited for and I’m happy to be on the sidelines paying taxes or pitching in to a nephew’s college fund.

I’m also not interested in having my photos included in family histories, or indeed being remembered at all. Not in a bitter way, just in the same way that I’m not interested in which mushrooms grow in Botswana. It’s a thing that I think is perfectly reasonable to be interested in.

[JKCalhoun]

I had no interest in genealogy until I had children of my own, got to be 50 years old.

It occurred to me that my parents would be dead one day and if it were to fall to me to tell the grandchildren the family origins I would be at a complete loss. I had relied on my "elders" to have that knowledge.

Ancestry and the like makes it easy to reconstruct your family tree even if you are starting with almost no knowledge. But there's the oral tradition of "your great grandmother's first husband died in a hotel from the gas lamp fixtures leaking" that would have been a lot harder to have found.

So I did find a sudden interest in genealogy. Or maybe it was a sense of duty or obligation — but that quickly did in fact turn into an interest.

Perhaps if you never do have children you might also never find an interest in genealogy.

I'll say this though, I have not fond any interest in finding genealogical connections to famous people. Nor have I had much interest in going back more than 150 years or so. I think the photos uniquely draw me into the lives of the generations captured in them. And perhaps because they are photos, not wills or marriage licenses, etc., I am come to feel either the futility and brevity of life or, at other times, the wonder and often humble dignity of it.

[WarOnPrivacy]

I felt the same way for most of the same reasons - plus other reasons like my father was about as bad a person as is possible. So I had not only disinterest but some reluctance to make sure I stayed disinterested.

In late 2017, I grudgingly promised a sibling to piece some of our extended family history together. In 2018 I found a lost sister on Ancestry. And then I found a cousin who pointed me to my last surviving aunt (who I visited in 2019 and who passed 6 weeks ago). I also reunited with another lost sister. The sisters and I talk most days.

By the end of this year I will have added about 10k names in Family Search and 15k-20k in Ancestry (w/ much overlapping). It's safe to say my interests changed. I'm not saying I think yours will. Certainly my genealogy numbers don't represent anything likely.

What I can say is that things change, sometimes unexpectedly.