Weldon's Ode to Wikitree: Why We Do Genealogy

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Surname/tag: Genealogy WikiTree

A life is one's present tense, bounded by past and future. Most of our energy should go to our present, by fully living our lives. But as young people, with overlap with the prior generations still possible, we may realize the last chance opportunities to learn what is known of our origins from our predecessors we can still access. This provides a solid base in family for launching our own adult lives. Then, at some point, one's future becomes one's final present.

Depending on personality, this final present may be energized by as many different experiences as one can enable. Or it may become the great reflection, when a life's loose ends are tied up. Or likely some of both, shifting from the former to the latter as age asserts itself.

For those who experienced a passion for rearward vision early on, the final present is likely the time to deeply pursue that vision, creating a great family history for posterity. Historical records and DNA become our great friends in this final pursuit.

Those genealogists on this final journey of mind likely possess uniquely shared pleasure stimuli.

Pleasure of the Process

We abound in curiosity, through which we receive a stronger than normal pleasure reward.

Solving complex puzzles, and specifically creating anew the history surrounding our collective 'whence', provides us a stronger than normal pleasure reward.

We experience psychic pain in the presence of loose ends in our lives. By collecting all currently available scraps of information for each ancestor into a recorded narrative of their existence, however brief, we remove loose ends that displease, while preserving knowledge of family personal history, a benefit to the curious ones that follow.

For us, giving is at least as pleasurable as receiving. We pleasure ourselves by honoring our forebears, proclaiming our gratitude for the wisdom they accumulated, the wise choices they made, their character during the battles they fought to ensure their own consequential meanings. and our future being.

Genealogy helps feed the soul's need for society, through participating in the great group effort that collects and preserves personal histories, and by meeting discovered relatives that we would otherwise never know.

Pleasure of the Result

Our tree branches end up intertwined with those of many others, enhancing our sense of brother- and sisterhood.

We gain understanding of the primary, shared existential component of our lives, making us more whole in our pursuit of life, through mindfulness of those from whom we descend, for future benefit of those that descend from us, illuminating the connectedness of us all.

Are Genealogists in the Minority?

Here's that curiosity demon again. With so many simple and easily acquired benefits, how can we understand a perhaps larger group of our fellow beings who express neither sensitivity to, nor interest in, genealogy? Please share your insights with me!