Member-only story
(Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania)
01 Aug 1898, Mon • Page 6
I rarely refer to myself as a genealogist (a word I often struggle to spell), preferring ‘family tree explorer’ or ‘family history documenter’ mainly because genealogists seem to be nuts.
Not all of them, not all genealogists. But enough of them are loud enough to suck the fun out of it.
- Rigidity about who I should include in my tree. Why include you couin’s spouse’s parents? Or the ex-husband of your 2x aunt? They aren’t your family lineage.
I include people for lots of reasons. They are/were part of the family that shaped me or impacted my life indirectly. My great-uncle’s sister and her husband spent a lot of time with my father when he was a child. Their stories shaped his life. And I found that her husband, Fritz, had an amazing backstory — he was a fighter pilot for Germany in WWI, fled when fascism was on the rise, raised foster children here in the US, got entangled unfairly with McCarthyism because of his military past, etc. That’s not my blood lineage, but it absolutely shaped my father’s life and by extension my own.
There’s also the reality that repeatedly I find one branch of my extended tree married into another branch. My paternal grandfather’s family settled in the United States long ago. So did my maternal grandfather’s line. Guess who are connected at all sorts of junctures?
