Robert

@robert@cornershop.network

A personal account on a small host serving boutique services.
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[?]Robert »
@robert@cornershop.network

@thickurt@woof.group @James@woof.group My mother has been my family's de facto genealogist since the '70s. She has done research over the decades tracking birth, marriage, death, and immigration records through ancestry.com, as well as municipalities and governments throughout Northern Europe. She found a brochure/leaflet mentioning one from Bunker Hill, another tracing lines to the Battle of Hastings, her own grandmother's line into Norway, and connections my father didn't even know he had deep into Ireland and Scotland. All of the pursuits were done to deepen connections and understanding of the past, never for "purity's sake".

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    [?]Robert »
    @robert@cornershop.network

    @thickurt@woof.group @James@woof.group (In school, I was always flummoxed when we were given a "heritage" type of assignment: I couldn't understand that other kids in my classes didn't know who their grandparents were or where they came from, let alone their great-great-grandparents. It wasn't until high school that I realized how blessed I was to not only know this information, but to be able to read the letters my great-great-grandfather wrote from California back to his own family in Chicago and New York.

    And while ancestry.com has access to amazing amounts of data, there is another library with amazing records, too. The Mormon Church has one of the most extensive genealogical libraries, and is available to the public; if you are ever in SLC and curious about your history, it's a physical and tangible way to connect with your past, even if neither you nor anyone in your line are Mormon.)

      [?]James »
      @James@woof.group

      @robert @thickurt
      Yes! I feel like there's been a generalization assumed in my statement earlier, but I might be reading too much into it. I wasn't at all saying that genealogy or tracing is just done for purity's sake, but relying on just DNA ancestry to determine where one comes from misses the humanity of it and reduces a family's story to scientific data points. This reductionism is where the problem lies, not in the building of a family tree and shared history

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