Genealogy has become sort of a craze, being hyped as something
everyone should want to pursue. There’s a TV commercial showing Modern Day Jane
tracing her lineage back to someone standing near someone who looks like Abraham Lincoln. Is this
important? I don’t understand. Suppose
you trace your family back several centuries and discover that your
great-great-great-great whatever was court secretary to the Margrave of Zuttgenstein.
What then?
Besides, if you go back far enough and cast your net widely enough, the odds are pretty good you’re going to come up with someone you’d
just as soon not claim as a relative. Conditions were rough back in the early
days and people did what they had to do. If that necessitated obliterating the
neighbors, a massacre by one of your ancestors might just be the seminal event
that established your line as a respectable family. Want to chance that? Once
you’re in, you don’t get to pick and choose.
I suppose there might be the occasional pleasant surprise
where you find you’re related, however distantly, to someone admirable. Whether
that gives you bragging rights several generations later is a question, though, or should be.
All I know on the subject
is what I heard in casual family conversation. My mother’s family landed
at Ellis Island from the old country in the first few year of the 20th
century. Whether it was fortuitous or they knew something in their bones, it
turned out a good move. From what I’ve read about WWII, even the Nazis were
impressed by the enthusiasm with which Romanians went after their Jewish
neighbors. Had the Leibas hesitated 40
years, I and others wouldn’t be around to write or read this.
One more reason for not bothering about genealogy: for a
lot of people it would only dissolve into the “nacht und nebel” of 1940s Europe.
